


Until I Can No Longer See the Sun

by shadesfalcon



Series: Broken Journey [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Dysphoria, Body Worship, Bondage, Breathplay, Burns, Caning, Cock & Ball Torture, Codependency, Dark, Dom Natasha, Dom/sub, Domestic Violence, Drowning, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Flashbacks, Gaslighting, Ignored Safeword, Lima Syndrome, Mind Games, NaNoWriMo, Paddling, Panic Attacks, Past Domestic Violence, Physical Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Praise Kink, Psychological Torture, Punishment, Rape/Non-con Elements, Scars, Sexual Content, Stockholm Syndrome, Sub Clint Barton, Torture, Training, Unhealthy Relationships, Victim Blaming, Whipping, probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-04-29 12:13:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 65,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5127203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadesfalcon/pseuds/shadesfalcon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Canon divergence where Clint is captured and given to Natasha to torture and break, months before he would have been assigned to assassinate her. However, as Natasha moves through the process of breaking Clint, she finds her own loyalties are more fragile than she'd anticipated, and she's both frightened and relieved by how quickly her life becomes consumed by what she was supposed to break and ruin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I want to start out with a sincere warning about this fic, because it’s a different kind of angst this time around. In my other fics, specifically the Stockholm Syndrome ‘verse, I make a conscious effort to demonstrate that the characters are being safe, sane, and consensual. Even though they make mistakes, they’re trying, learning, and improving.
> 
> There is no such attempt here. I even put a non-con warning in the tags, because the "gray area" here is a really really dark shade of gray.
> 
> This is an exploration of Clint Barton being a hurt baby bird, because that’s what I wanted to write (and what I was asked for on multiple occasions, so yeah this is your fault too).

“Just let loose,” they’d said. “Think of this like a vacation. It’ll be fun.”

Massaging her bitten hand—teeth marks visible—Natasha couldn’t help but think that they didn’t understand the concept of fun very well at all. Fun was being on a roof fifty stories in the air, and then jumping off. Fun was dark corners people didn’t know you were in. Fun was the moment you realized you’d won.

Clint Barton was not fun.

She kept her face impassive as she stared at the young man where he sat tied to a chair as she tried to still her breathing. Injured and drugged as he was, getting him tied there had been much more of a hassle than she’d been expecting. The deep bite – which had drawn blood – was more than enough evidence of that.

At least he was all the worse for the wear, with that hit she got in to his face. It was already starting to bruise, spreading across this cheek. And he was just glaring at her, half-asleep in his drug-induced semi-stupor. Glaring like she was his own death come to touch him.

Maybe she was.

Tactical had picked him up a few days ago. They’d only gotten the jump on him because he’d exposed himself to save some kids, but they hadn’t wasted the opportunity. Taking someone like the Hawk out of play had been worth the four men he’d taken down during the attempt.

However, they hadn’t had a particular use for him and, somehow, he’d ended up in Natasha’s little corner of the base. Not that anyone had asked her.

“See if you can break him,” they’d said. “Just have some fun.”

Again, she wasn’t really sure where they were getting their definition of the word fun. Interesting, maybe. But fun? She wasn’t even sure she knew what the word meant.

She paced around the chair, letting her mind map the injuries he’d committed against her body during their brief – though unexpectedly violent – struggle.

He was strong. She had to give him that. Impressively strong. No stupid qualms about honor and fighting fair and ‘I don’t hit pretty girls’. No, he was in it to survive. Just like she was.

She wondered if that would make him harder or easier to break.

Her eyes traced his arms, straining against the restraints, and then up to his gagged mouth. His lips stretched wide around the humiliating ball-gag, though his eyes were expressive enough to compensate for the imposed silence.

Maybe the endeavor wouldn’t be completely without entertainment. And it was always good to pick up some new interrogation techniques. Trial and error.

So…

Start slow, or no? She weighed the risks and benefits of each, but what decided her, in the end, was how much time she had for the project. She was on mandatory “off the grid” time after that disaster in Belgrade – _not her fault, not her fault, not her fault_. So why not play a long slow game. A few years back, one of her colleagues – now dead – had said it was impossible to torture someone into loving you. Natasha had disagreed.

If there was ever a moment to put that to the test…

She closed her eyes shut against the memory of her failure in Belgrade, then opened them again quickly enough that it might have passed for a blink with a normal civilian. Yes, she decided. She would use the mandatory free time to play this experiment out.

She stood straight from the table she’d been leaning against, and walked to his chair.

“Clinton Francis Barton,” she sighed, running her fingers along his face and down his neck. She walked a slow circle around the chair, letting her fingers drag behind her along his skin.

“What am I supposed to do with you?” she consider aloud, and was slightly amused when he answered her from behind the gag. It was unintelligible, but he certainly had a lot to say.

Very…responsive.

His eyes were darting around the room, taking in everything with the rapidity of a trained sniper. He registered the concrete floor and walls, including the red stripe across the floor that divided the room in half. One part had Clint and Natasha, as well as various instruments obviously intended for discomfort and torture. The other had a bed and a un-enclosed showerhead, as well as a toilet and sink.

When he’d finished his glance around the room, he moved his eyes to her, eyeing her with the same evaluating stare. So she stood in front of him, leaned down and looked him right in the eye, and broke his finger. Just the little one, and on his non-dominant right hand. If she did succeed in bringing him to heel, she’d prefer him to still be useful.

He didn’t scream. There was a choking noise, and he leaned forward in his restraints, but he didn’t scream. Which was really just a waste of energy at this point. He’d learn how to choose his battles eventually.

She moved around behind him as she waited until his breathing slowed back down to a normal rate, standing behind him out of sight. Then she reached to card her fingers through his hair.

He jerked at the first touch of her, but she continued carefully. He was sweating, and the damp feeling soaked through to her fingers. She ran her fingers over the skin of the scalp and let her thumbs move down to massage at the base of his skull. Slowly, she turned his head from side to side and smiled in amusement as he fought against relaxing; fighting against her manipulation.

She leaned down and put her face right in his hair, breathing deeply. She could smell his exertion and fear, and his hair was exactly the right length to hold tight in her fingers. She breathed deeply again, in and out, knowing he could hear and feel her, and all the while she continued to kneed at his tight neck muscles.

“As gifts go,” she murmured to him, “I guess you’re not half bad.”

***

She left him there for a while after that. It wasn’t exactly an innovative move, but isolation was effective whether it had been done before or not. She did take a moment to set his finger. She kneeled down in front of him and soothed him when he cried out at the manipulation, whispering to him in Russian and kissing his knee gently.

Then she left.

She wanted to think out how she was going to play the whole thing, because the man was a professional. The rout moves would take longer than the unconventional ones and, even though she knew she had all the time in the world, she found herself looking forward to the first moment he broke.

“First” moment, because people have an alarming propensity for healing themselves. She herself had had to be broken so many times before she finally accepted it. Stupid little girl clinging to false facts that didn’t even matter. No wonder she’d made her trainers so angry.

She watched Barton on the security feed. Even as she pursued through acquired files and paperwork, she had half of her screen as the surveillance. She found herself staring at him while she was trying to think through another problem.

She managed to keep herself occupied like that for about a day and a half.

Then she began to play with the temperature in the room, slowly turning up the heat. Watching him carefully on the screens, she pinpointed the moment he noticed what she was doing, but that was the point, after all. To put all the power in her hands until his head bowed with the weight of the imbalance.

She kept an internal timer going, and every hour, she cranked the heat up another degree. When he leaned over and started dry-heaving around the ball-gag, she figured it was time for another appearance. She set the room’s controls back to air conditioning, timing it so the cool air started blowing as she walked through the door.

_Associate me with relief._

She had a cold glass of water with her, and she placed it carefully within his sight before she unlatched the gag and gently pulled it off his face. He tried to follow it with his head, and she didn’t blame him. His lips were raw and cracking, and the movement couldn’t feel good. However, she insisted, and the thing eventually came off, caked and bloody.

When it was off, she took him by the chin to examine the yellowing bruise on his face where she’d hit him during the transfer.

“I don’t understand why you’d make me do this to you,” she sighed.

_Your fault. Pain is always your fault._

He licked his lips, or tried to, and then glanced over her shoulder at the glass of water. Condensation was sliding down its side.

“You gon--” He broke off with a dry cough and a hiss of pain. She waited patiently until he tried again.

“Are you going to make me beg for it?” he eventually managed.

“Are you going to be stupid about it?” she countered. “You need it, and I’m willing to give it to you. You don’t even have to beg. Just ask. Use my name.”

“Which one?” But he was looking at the water again, and she could see him weighing his pride with his survival.

“If you’re smart, a nice one.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want it so much. I appreciate the fact that I haven’t had to piss, while I’ve been in this chair. Something tells me that, assuming I get hydrated, you’re not the kind of jailer to let me up for a bathroom break.”

She continued waiting. The stalling was just a tactic to try and convince himself he had some kind of power anywhere in this situation. She didn’t mind. Even if he did actually believe that falsehood, she’d pull the rug out from under him soon enough. In the meantime, he was going to have to capitulate, if he wanted to continue surviving at all.

As she suspected, after a few more moments of cocky grinning – the effect of which was severely damaged by his bleeding lips - the odds came up in favor of his survival. He readjusted his smile to slight closed-lips amusement.

“May I have the water, Natasha?”

She kissed him gently on the forehead, and his whole body stiffened. He wasn’t sweating anymore, on the brink of severe dehydration, and the scent of him wasn’t nearly as appealing, but she let her lips linger for a moment, and then she withdrew to bring him the water.

She placed it to his lips and tilted it up. She could see him try to drink slowly, and he even managed it at first, but his body got ahead of his brain eventually. And it didn’t help that she just kept tilting the glass. Daring him to take it all.

He sputtered suddenly, and she took a graceful step backwards, just in time to avoid the spray of cool water that he wretched up suddenly. The restraints kept him from being able to lean forward, and the clear vomit covered his legs.

Natasha hummed in amusement.

“Got a little ahead of ourselves, hmm?”

_Your fault. You literally asked for it._

“Let’s try again,” she quipped.

“Hang on,” he gasped, trying to get his body back under control.

“No.”

She took him by the chin and forced his head back. She dug her fingers into his cheeks so they pressed into the space between his back molars. Forcing his mouth open, she poured the rest of the water.

It sloshed, too fast, running into his nose and mouth as he struggled to get out of her grasp.

When she stopped, he dry-heaved some more, coughing and spitting and licking his lips.

“Crazy girl, huh?” he laughed. “You getting off on this? I can see you and I are gonna have fun.”

She slapped him casually. Painful but not like he was worth her attention.

“This is going to be a long game, Clint,” she informed him, running her fingers down his face. “You’re going to want to set your pace for a marathon, not a reckless sprint. Being a little respectful would be a smart way to do that.”

She left the room again, wiping the filth from his face off on her pants. She wasn’t going to come back with a glass, but rather an IV. Their tentative exploration of each other had come to its conclusion. She needed to get him back to health because she was ready to make her first move, and it was going to be a harsh one.

***

The nursing back didn’t take long. The Agent was obviously used to pushing his body, and a few IVs was all it took to move him out of the danger zone and into the more coherent zone.

Which was good, because she intended to bring him all the way back down. It’s no good trying to break apart someone who’s half dead. They don’t learn anything from it.

While the IV ran, she’d been silent, keeping herself to herself in favor of watching how much trouble Clint could get himself into on his own – without her actively pushing him into anything.

It turned out, the answer was “a lot.”

“So, this is your kink then, or whatever?” he drawled. “Medical shit and helpless prisoners? You know, there are people who you can pay for this kind of thing.”

When she didn’t answer, he continued.

“But then, I guess you’d have to kill them afterward, or whatever. It’s not like there’s a lot that you can do and let them live. Gotta preserve that Black Widow reputation. Which reminds me, do you eat them afterward? Or just eat them out?”

He laughed then, at his own lame joke, and Natasha rolled her eyes while out of his sight. She had a list of adjectives that she usually expected from SHIELD Agents. Stoic was on the list. Corny was not. Clint was ruining her list.

“I have to ask, Widow, how’d we end up here? I’ve read your file, sparse as it is, and you don’t seem the type to keep someone alive. Or in good health. At least, assuming that’s saline in the IV and not potassium chloride or whatever.”

He tried to crane his head back to look at her, but she refused to meet his eyes and just continued to play with the IV valve.

“What’s got into you?” he asked. “You were so talkative a few days ago. Don’t tell me. I’m winning you over with my wily charms. You’re in awe. You can’t speak for fear of revealing your true emotions.”

He would have to try harder than that to break through her masks.

“You know,” he continued, turning back to look forward again. “I’ve heard more about you than you might think. I’m pretty sure they were getting me ready to go after you. Out of everyone at SHIELD, I’m probably among the top five, when it comes to knowledge of you. And I’ve got to say, this is kind of pathetic.”

Oh, he was going to a personal attack now. He was just bouncing all over the anti-interrogation tactics. No consistency.

“Because,” he continued, “you don’t make the shots in your own life. You obey, because that’s what you’ve always done. If you’re keeping me, then it’s because they want you to. If you’re torturing me, it’s because they want you to. Every question you ask me and every tactic you take will be them, bleeding through into your hands. Because your thoughts are not your own, any more than your decisions are. You can’t escape the over-whelming control they have over you, so much to the point that they’re not even afraid to let you play with me on your own, because you’re so far underneath their thumb that you’ll still do as they bid, without them so much as having to open their mouths.”

He waited for a moment, probably to see if he’d pushed far enough to get any kind of audible reaction out of her, but her mouth stayed shut and her breathing stayed steady. This play was better than his previous one, but he’d have to come up with something she hadn’t whispered to herself in the dark if he wanted to unsettle her.

“It doesn’t make sense to me, though,” he added softly. “I’ve seen how you work. I’ve seen your wake. You’re amazing. You’re unbelievable in a world where we’re trained to think that nothing is unbelievable. I can’t imagine the rules of reality you could break if you were allowed to decide on your own. What you could be, if they didn’t have their ropes around your neck and their fingers in your hair?”

She’d underestimated him.

“I could bring you out of here, you know. Bring you back. SHIELD has a history of leniency, and you know it. We could work with you. Get rid of your triggers. Get rid of at least some of your nightmares. We could give you the moment you’d need to save yourself. Can you imagine it? Clawing your way back up over the cliff edge with bloody triumphant fingers?”

As if it would work. As if they wouldn’t chase her until the death awaiting at the end of that game. The universe didn’t let people like her escape. There was no mercy within the laws of reality for people like her. It wasn’t allowed.

***

She waited until he was growing comfortable with the situation before she broke him for the first time. He’d been right in his assumption about her opinion on bathroom breaks, and he’d had to piss himself more than once. The room stunk of it, although he’d probably gotten used to the smell, being unable to leave the room as Natasha could.

He seemed unconcerned by the situation, and Natasha guessed he’d been in more uncomfortable ones. Gods knew she had. Sometimes, when you didn’t move from your position for days at a time, you just did what you have to.

The smell wasn’t the only thing he got used to over the days that she silently nursed him. He acclimatized to her presence; her touch. His breathing began to maintain at steady, even when she first entered the room. She knew he wasn’t stupid enough to believe that she’d never hurt him, but he took the brief respite with all willingness.

He probably thought someone was looking for him, and was more than happy to let her idle away their time together.

When he stopped tensing under her hands – and when he’d pretty much stopped talking to her altogether – she changed the game.

He’d become so used to her fingers trailing along his skin, as she examined the IVs and checked in with him, that he didn’t notice the upcoming change at first. She’d gotten the first leather strap around his right wrist before he’d noticed.

It wasn’t like he could do anything though, when he did realize. His body tensed under the stress of the unknown and Natasha allowed herself the moment of amusement. It was important for her to find happiness in the little moments – important to keep herself emotionally stable. Trying to turn a subject’s loyalties could be dangerous and, while she knew she wasn’t weak, she knew better than to carelessly stick her fingers into volatile games.

“Careful,” she murmured, when he jerked his hands in the restraints that still bound him to the chair. “Watch your finger.” Her first words to him in days.

That allowed her to finished fastening the strap around his wrist, a little lower down the arm than the bindings holding him to the chair. Then she repeated that action with his left wrist. That one gave her more trouble, since his fear of un-setting his finger was not a factor, and because he was realizing that something was about to change. All that calmness that had slowly been seeping into his body fled like a rushing tide.

The new straps themselves were more cuffs than anything else, although Natasha tended to reserve that word for something with a little more shape. These were just double strips of soft leather, able to be latched and hooked together.

“What are we doing now?” he asked, voice already husky with underuse.

She ignored him and, once both wrists were wrapped, she went to a rolling table that sat off to the side. Uncharacteristically, it didn’t hold a conglomeration of torture instruments, but rather a nasty-looking single-tail whip, a few sheets of paper, and a pen. She wrote a few words calmly, mildly surprised that he didn’t repeat his question, and then put the pen down on top of the paper.

Then she walked over and stood in front of him again, and took his chin to tilt his head up to look at her.

“I’m going to untie your right wrist from the chair,” she told him. “Then I’m going to hook that cuff to the one on your left wrist. Both of those things are going to happen. You don’t have the strength or the advantage to make it not. The only thing you have control over is how much you piss me off between those two moments. Because, if I have to fight with you over this, our first session is going to be much more painful than I otherwise intend.”

She took her knife from her sheath and slid it under the ties around his right wrist, ready to slice through them at the slightest pressure. She could see Clint’s eyes focused on the knife, waiting like a bird of prey.

“I want to ease you into this,” she said. “I want our first session to be a warm-up. But if you’re going to disobey me, then I’ll have to punish you for it.”

“Disobey you,” he scoffed, not moving his eyes from the knife and it’s temptation of freedom. “Like I’m a toddler.”

“You’re being rude, Clint,” she chastised. It didn’t bother her that he balked at the word. He’d become conditioned to it soon enough.

Then she cut the rope. She made sure to slow her movements – she didn’t want him to get overcome by an uncharacteristic bout of fear and decide not to move at all – and watched smugly for the moment when he decided to make a break for his life.

He jerked his arm free of the cut ties and shot it forward toward her knife. However, she flipped it over quickly, hiding the blade in her palm and the handle within her intertwining fingers.

The moment he saw the knife move he changed tactics, lunging instead for her throat. She allowed the attempt, letting him brush his fingers against her skin, and then shoved his chair roughly with her foot. It slid backwards a few inches, changing the distance Clint was aiming to cross. While he adapted very quickly, it wasn’t quickly enough. She dropped her knife to skitter away on the floor, and got his free wrist in her hand before he could wrap its fingers around her throat.

He made a third escape attempt when she forced the cuffs toward each other, twisting his hand around to get his fingers around her wrist instead, with the clear intention to break it if he could.

He couldn’t. She knew the feel of the latch and the straps, having used them often in her work, and had him re-secured before his fingers could pinpoint the right place to dig in and ruin her tendons and bones. She pulled her arms free of his desperate fingers with a little shake and stepped back to look down at him with disapproval.

“I warned you,” she sighed. “Which was very generous of me. And you were stupid about it.”

“Oh, please,” Clint seethed. “Like you didn’t know I would try. You would have done the same, in my position.”

“I didn’t know you would try,” Natasha corrected, walking over to pick up the piece of paper she’d written on just a minute before. “You could have been good. I certainly gave you the opportunity to be good.”

She held the paper in front of his face so he could read it, momentarily silencing any further comment he might make.

Written across the page, in neat English words, was: _reach for the knife, go for the throat, try to break the wrist._

“You see?” she said. “I knew exactly what would happen, if you chose to disobey. I knew before you knew.” She leaned in closer to him, allowing him to feel the heat of her breath and added, “I will always know before you know.”

Then she was gone, letting the cool air of the room mark the absence of her presence against his skin. She let him think about the exchange while she finished her set-up, moving his hands, still bound together, up above his head and securing them to the set of rings secured in the ceiling. Then she cut him away from the chair altogether and made her last minute adjustments.

He struggled a bit, but there wasn’t much he could do. Even when his legs where freed and he was forced to stand, she was quick to use the system in place to pulley him up to stretch up onto his toes. His balance teetered, unwieldy but not precarious, on just the wrong side of comfortable.

“I would have been nice,” she sighed, retrieving her knife from the floor and returning to stand behind him. “That’s something you’ll be better off to learn quickly. I’m not going to lie to you in here. Out there?” She gestured widely with her arm to indicate the whole of the outside world. “Yeah, I’d lie to you out there. In a heartbeat. But not in here. There are no lies in this room.”

She slid the knife under the hem of his shirt and slit it apart all the way up to his neck.

“This room is for truths, bloody as they may be. So there will be no lies from you…” She slid the knife across one sleeve. “…or from me.” And then she slid it across the other.

The rent shirt folded over on itself, stuck momentarily to the sweat of his skin, and then fluttered down to the floor, leaving his upper body bare and revealing how much he was already straining – shifting his weight to find a weakness or an advantage.

Then Natasha retrieved the whip from the table and took position behind Clint, letting herself re-familiarize with the weight of the weapon in her hand.

“You have been very rude, over the last few days, while I took care of you. You spoke above your place, haughty and ridiculously disrespectful. I bit my tongue, patiently, allowing you time to calm down, acclimatize, and correct yourself. But you have not only disregarded my grace, you have further pushed me and also attacked me directly. You have left me no choice but to push you past your limits, as you have pushed me past mine.”

She let the first strike fly, and the whip hissed its warning before laying itself in a red imprint horizontally across Clint’s shoulder blades. His muscles had tensed involuntarily in anticipation, worsening the sting of the lash.

And Natasha hadn’t held back. She intended this session to speak volumes. She would traumatize him. Rend him. She would make it so he would never quite recover from the sounds of a flying whip.

She laid another two strikes in the same manner, watching the blood drip already, even from his unwarmed back.

“Ungrateful,” she spat, pausing. “They gave me free reign with you. I could have mutilated you. I could have broken your hand so you would never shoot again. I even _set_ your finger for you.”

Another horizontal strike, this time lower down. Low enough that the weight of the whip would convey enough pressure to reach in deep to the vagus nerve where it coursed by his kidneys. She watched his body twitch then, trying to fight through the automatic reaction to stop breathing.

Then she changed the position and laid a diagonal mark from left shoulder to right hip, and then another in mirror-image, to complete the X.

Clint was taking it well. After that first bite, he’d forced his back to relax, in the wake of the sting. He’d flinched that couple of times, but he hadn’t re-tensed. He hadn’t spoken either, obviously getting himself down into a solid headspace.

She considered forcing him to try and earn a reprieve – via some memory game where success would earn him the illusion of mercy – but she pushed the idea away for another day. While it would work to keep him in the moment - with the pain - this wasn’t about manipulation. Today, she just needed to break him.

She did pause, though, and step forward to lay her hand on the back of his neck, letting the tips of her fingers card through edge of his hairline. She waited until his muscles ticked underneath her fingers, and then moved back again to resume her stance, satisfied that his attempt to reach a safe headspace had been subverted.

She didn’t speak for a while after that. Marking and remarking the X across his back. She didn’t vary the strength of the lashes, letting each one bite deep enough to draw blood. As the skin weakened, worried by the constant beating, the lashes bit deeper and the slow dripping became a dangerous amount of blood.

He could feel it dripping down his back. She knew he could feel it, because he pulled himself out of his headspace to watch out for his own life. It was fine to sink yourself out of reality for generic torture, but if your life was in danger it needed your attention.

The reclamation of his cognizant awareness cost him. He began to hiss and cry out, quickly escalating from low noises to harsh cries.

“Natasha,” he finally hissed, and she punished that one with a particularly vicious strike, dropping down to lay the mark across his thighs, sharp enough to tear the fabric.

He screamed at that. A shrill noise while he wobbled on his feet. The chains had been holding most of his weight for some time, but now his body dipped as he lost his footing completely. She waited while the muscles on his back – still semi-defined after a week of malnutrition – contracted and shifted underneath his skin as he pulled himself part of the way up to get his feet back under him.

“You may only call me Natasha when we are not in session, pet. Here, you will refer to me with a title of respect.”

She left him to pick the title, unsurprised when he went with “ma’am.” It was one he was used to.

“You’re killing me, _ma’am_ ,” he snapped, letting a surge of anger give him the energy to speak and think coherently.

She made a noncommittal noise of assent, and laid down another few strikes, this time letting them fall in a haphazard pattern all over his back. She threw them quickly enough that he didn’t have time to recover enough to speak again.

When she paused again, and when his breathing has slowed to a dull rasp, she asked, “Did you want to ask me something?”

She played with him for a while, then. Every time he seemed to be about to speak, she’d lay another series of rapid strikes and then wait for him to get close again. If it seemed like he’d given up on speaking, she asked the question again, another way.

“I’m getting impatient, love. What did you want?”

Eventually, her arm started to get sore. More to the point, she was becoming concerned that she actually was killing him. She was marking his blood loss with a mental measurement, but he’d started making little rasping noises with each breath.

If it was a panic attack, she was fine with that, but if his body was going in to shock, then that would be unfortunate. The open wounds on his back would mean the subsequent physiological vasodilation would increase his blood loss. Not to mention, it could potentially start a positive feedback mechanism that would drop him into hypotension and then death.

She sighed heavily, letting the whip hang loosely by her side, and then walked forward to check on him.

“You don’t sound so good,” she murmured in his ear.

“Please stop,” he whispered back. “Ma’am. Please stop. I can’t breathe.”

“Mmm, you just think you can’t breathe. Trust me on that, all right. I’m not ready to let you die just yet.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Take a deep breath, love,” she insisted.

“Just tell me what you want, and we can start figuring this out. Fuck, I don’t know, maybe it’s even something I can give you. The world of spies is treacherous and variable. Maybe you want something I’m willing to give you.”

She reached up and dug her fingers into the slits of his back, and he screamed again. He stayed still, at first, but when she wormed her fingers around, folding back some of the skin, he began to thrash wildly.

When he’d breathed out so far he had no more air, opening and closing his mouth like a fish while he futilely tried to command his muscles to inspire, and took her hand away and started petting his head again. The blood wiped off slowly in his matted hair.

“To me,” Natasha began again, “that sounded like a play for power. Knowing what I want means you immediately have more control over the situation than I do.” She brushed her fingers close enough to his back that he could feel the slight pressure, held there in threatening warning.

“It’s not your place to dictate the ebb and flow of our interactions,” she informed him, still not really touching his back. “Not in session. Not out of session.”

Her fingers were close enough to feel him react to the phrase “out of session,” and wondered if it had just then occurred to him, that she might be doing this for no reason other than that she wanted to. Because if they were to interact out of sessions, this wasn’t just about torture. This was about Clint himself. This was about him and her.

Wisely, he didn’t comment on the matter and just muttered, “yes, ma’am.”

Natasha removed the threat of her fingers grazing at his wounds.

“Good. Now breath in. And now out.”

She led him carefully through a few calming cycles of deep breathing, humming approval when she ordered him to continue on his own, and he did so.

“That’s much better,” she cooed. “Now we can continue.”

“What?” Clint balked. “No, wait. Wait, wait, please, ma’am, please wait just a minute more, please.”

Natasha ignored him.

She didn’t stop again until he was no longer screaming in tandem with the strikes, but was instead just screaming. Constantly hyperventilating screaming filled with nonsense syllables. Then, suddenly, his head pitched forward and his body hung limp.

Natasha decided to call it quits with that. Clint had been fighting hard for consciousness, obviously afraid that she’d actually kill him and unwilling to leave the decision up to chance. If he’d passed out, then he was probably down for the count.

She coiled the whip and laid back down on the table, careful to place it away from the papers lying there to keep it from staining them with the blood. Then she walked over and slowly lowered Clint’s swaying body till some of his weight was on his knees.

She was struck by the art of the moment. Clint’s back was bloody and flayed, but his strength was undeniable as his muscles were visible even under the gore. He was breathing more evenly, the lack of external panic allowing his physiology to lower its adrenaline levels and reduce the strain of his body. He was pitched forward slightly, with the chains pulling his arms back to strain his shoulders, and his hips canted to the side with his off-balance weight. Like a painting you’d see in the back corner of a museum. The type most people walk past quickly because the erotic nature of the violence frightens them.

This was where her mind was when she unhooked him from the ceiling. When Clint fell forward with the force of gravity. When his arms suddenly shot out to catch himself in obvious complete consciousness, if not complete coherency.

“Fuck,” was all she had time for, before his arm swept to the side and took her feet out from under her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok so this was more physical torture, but we'll get into the psychological torture soon enough, don't you worry.
> 
> I'm planning updates every other day and REMEMBER it's a NaNoWriMo thing, so zero editing is happening. That's right. Prepare for the horror that is a first draft.


	2. Chapter 2

The massive burst of energy had clearly cost him dearly. He hit the ground with a soft splattering of his own blood, and then made a surge for her ankle again, scrabbling for the knife kept in its sheath there.

She’d recovered from the shock of his movements, and was suddenly, irrationally angry. It was her own goddamn fault that she’d underestimated both his stamina and his deceptive capabilities, but that didn’t mean she was going to feel bad for taking it out on him.

She kicked his face roughly and dislodged his grip, scrambling to her feet soon afterward.

“I promised you I would break you today,” she growled, planting one knee in his back and shoving his neck down with one hand. He screamed again, thrashing about for a bit to try and get his knees up under him, but his body was too spent, and he eventually lay still again.

“You’d have tried it, too,” he panted.

“I did,” she responded. “I tried again and again and again. How do you think I know to tell you it’s useless? Remember? There are no lies here. And with that in mind, pet, please understand that I am going to make you regret that monumentally stupid decision. Stupid, _stupid_ decision. Because that’s all I’ve seen out of you so far, you fucking stupid boy!”

She grabbed him by the hair and forced him on his hand and knees toward the chair that had been slid away toward the back of the room. He fought her systematically at first, but then opted for dead weight and allowed himself to collapse on the floor. Accepting that he’d run himself out of options.

She was close enough, however, so she kept one hand tangled in his hair and reached the other out to wrap her fingers around the chair armrest and drag it toward her.

“I am going to make a rash promise,” she hissed. “Because you have pissed me off on a personal level, I promise that if you do not scramble up enough to lay your chest on the seat of this chair, I will permanently damage your body right now.”

It was a risky play, in theory, but Clint had already begun to shake underneath her grip. She doubted he was the kind of Agent that would willingly give up his ability to be useful in the field.

Sure enough, it was only a few heartbeats before he pushed himself up with his arms and placed his forearms on the chair, still kneeling on the floor in front of it. He seemed relieved to no longer have to struggle to hold up his own weight, even with his ass ignominiously stuck out in the air.

“Don’t fucking move,” she ordered.

She grabbed his waistband and pulled, stripping off the rest of his clothing roughly. Maybe it had been a mistake to let him keep any of his dignity in the first place. A whip was a torturer’s play, and being allowed clothing was a sign of respect. She really had only herself blame for his last-ditch effort to escape.

She stalked to the back of the room, an area previously out of Clint’s field of visions, and fetched a heavy cane from the implements there.

“No more snarky comments?” she asked. Her anger at herself was fading away and she felt herself relenting on her intentions. She’d meant to flay him, a moment ago. But that wouldn’t accomplish anything.

Still, she had no intention of letting him get away with his rebellion, either.

“Anything to say to me?” she asked.

“Just get on with it,” he said, too quietly to be interpreted as defiance.

“Tell you what,” Natasha sighed. “I could bind your knees to the legs of the chair. Have you spread out and compromised like that. Or…” She let the sentence hang, watching Clint try to figure out if she was going to offer him a better or a worse option.

“Or, you could keep still on your own. And, if you keep still on your own, I promise that I will stop before your skin begins to shred. Not before I draw blood, because let’s not get crazy here. You did let your idiocy run wild there, but I’ll stop before you even get much past the point of scaring.”

A pause.

“So, can you keep still?”

He dropped his head down so his forehead touched the seat of the chair.

“I’m waiting,” she prompted.

His capitulation, when it came, was almost too quiet to hear. But only almost. Each word was still distinct, if a little slurred.

“Please, ma’am, I will stay still.”

She struck him then, without so much as letting herself step forward into the swing, so as to take him completely by surprise. The stroke was a little diagonal, without the proper stance to guide her, but still stretched across both cheeks in a white and then pink and then red line.

At the crack of impact, he made a high-pitched noise that he cut off almost as soon as he realized he was making it, but it had still been unmistakably a whimper.

“Say it how I said it, love,” she chastised. She wanted him echoing her as soon as possible, even if it started out consciously. “Say ‘I can keep still.’ ”

“I can keep still.”

Another vicious strike, without warning, low on his thighs and cutting deep. He cried out, louder than his little noise at the first strike.

“I didn’t think I’d need to remind you to be respectful,” she said. “You’re really playing with your own life here. I offered you this deal because I’ve been trying to be kind to you all day, and you haven’t been smart enough to let me. Don’t make me be harsh yet again. I’m not sure how much more of this you can take.”

“Please, ma’am,” Clint gasped, already readjusting his stance on his knees so as to require the least amount of effort to stay upright against the expected onslaught. “I can keep still, ma’am.”

She held the cane gently against his ass, lining up with the red line from her first strike, then making minuscule readjustments, so as to be perfectly horizontal.

“Then let’s begin.”

She didn’t talk after that. Not for the entirety of the rest of the session. She let Clint make all the noise. He was already mostly broken from the whip, and it didn’t take more than a few strokes on top of each other before he stopped trying to hold back his screams. After that, she just made sure to lay bloody lines, both in horizontal and diagonal, from the top of his ass to as close to his knees as she felt comfortable getting.

“I’m sorry!” he screaming, giving her a momentary pause. He didn’t say anything else though, so she continued, only to get another screamed apology, this time less coherent.

At least he was finally being smart. She didn’t really believe the apology, but she didn’t have the slightest problem with him going through the motions, as long as they were her motions. Body first, then heart.

Not that she slowed down. She kept the pace until his words were nearly incoherent, interspersed with wordless screams.

“Please, I’m—I can’t!” Another shriek. “I’m sorry, ma’am I’m sorry I won’t, I can’t – _fuck ah! fuck_ – I won’t. I’m not stupid, I swear. I’m not stupid! I won’t! I’m not stupid!”

That was what stopped her, in the end. That when he broke from reality, he didn’t beg her to stop. Instead, he scrambled to assure her of his worth.

She held the cane loosely in her fingers and listened. His words became quieter, without the pain of the cane bringing them into crescendo, but he didn’t stop speaking, and he didn’t show any sign that he would do so voluntarily any time soon.

“I’m not stupid,” he mumbled, his whole body trembling. “I’m not gonna do anything stupid. I’m sorry. Please believe me.” He turned his head and buried his face in his arm, muffling the repetition.

“I’m not stupid, I’m not stupid, I’m not stupid.”

He was hyperventilating, which must be agony to the skin of his back as his mind struggled to convince him to breathe in more air than his lungs would let him. His breath kept catching in heavy sobs, and she knew without having to look that his face would be drenched with tears.

“All right,” she said. “Listen to me.” She laid the cane down on the floor, to be tended to later, and kneeled down next to him. “Listen to me, love.” It took her several repetitions of the phrase, as well as a soft hand on his neck, to bring him back to the moment.

“You say you’re not stupid,” she said, once she finally had some semblance of his attention. “Prove it. You’ve seen the red line in on the floor, right?”

He nodded, a half-second too slowly, as his mind fumbled through lag.

“That line divides the spaces of the this room. Over here, where you’ve been since your delivery, is for when we are in session. Over there is for when we are not. Say it back to me.”

“This side is for when we’re in session. That side is for when we’re not.” A pause, and then a shuddering breath or realization. “Ma’am! Ma’am, ma’am, ma’am!”

“Hush,” she scolded, slapping him lightly on the thigh. It was still enough to cause him to make a choking noise and to screw his eyes shut tightly, but that was the end of it.

“Now, I’m satisfied with this, and ready for this session to be over. However, if you think you need to stay on this side and have me work with you some more, then of course I will let you ask for that. Do you want to stay?”

“No, ma’am! Please no, ma’am.”

“All right, then. We’re done. You may go to the other side of the room.”

Clint craned his head, judging the distance between himself and the red line. He hissed at the slight movement, and they both knew the journey would be its own final type of torture. But he had a goal now, something he could actually do, rather than something he could only endure, and he only waited a few heartbeats before he slid off the chair and began to crawl.

It took him a while, relatively speaking, and Natasha walked beside him every step of the way. She stayed right next to him, waiting for him to get a sufficient distance ahead, and then taking a single step, and then waiting again.

More importantly, her ankle sheath was right there, clearly visible. Daring him to take his eyes of his goal. He didn’t so much as twitch for it. Not even with his eyes.

His hands finally crossed the line, and he collapsed to the floor with a sigh of relief, lying on his stomach.

“All the way,” she ordered, tapping his leg with her shoe.

He didn’t say anything in response, but drew himself wearily up to his hand and knees again, shuffled the last little bit, and collapsed back down again.

“Good,” she said, crouching down next to him. “Now, Clint, we’re going to get you to the bed, and it’s going to hurt, because any movement is going to hurt you, but then you can lie down. Understand?”

_You’re done moving when I say you’re done moving. You can rest when I say you can rest. You don’t get to decide that the middle of the floor is good enough._

He screamed when she got him to his feet, all just to stumble the last couple of steps to collapse face-first onto the bed, but he complied. He also didn’t protest when she bound his ankles and wrists to the bedposts at the four corners.

“Antibiotic cream,” she warned him, just before she began to spread it around on his back. It also had epinephrine and lidocaine, to stop the bleeding and to lessen the pain enough that he could sleep for a few hours, but she didn’t tell him that.

He didn’t make an actual noise when she touched his back with the cold cream on her fingers. The warm cloths she used to wipe blood away from each area got little hissing noises, but mostly he just laid there.

When she was halfway through, she stopped to lean down and look at his face, thinking maybe he had passed out, or just fallen asleep with the stress of it all. However, he was still awake, if a little drowsy. He looked at her, when her face came into his view, staring right into her eyes with no discernable emotions at all. His pupils were blown wide, and Natasha was struck by the thought that this was how someone would look in a drug-induced trip to another reality, locked somewhere in their minds.

She titled her head, moving a little, and was oddly relieved when his eyes tracked her face, keeping the eye contact. So at least he wasn’t completely checked out. She waved her hand in front of his face, too, moving slowly and watching his eyes get distracted from her face to follow the movement of her fingers. Aware of his surrounding then, on some level.

Satisfied, she moved back to the middle of the bed to resume her task.

When she was done, she stood and then leaned down to kiss his forehead. Then she moved away and dimmed the lights.

With the imminent threat of her presence removed, he fell almost immediately into sleep. It would probably be the first real sleep he’d gotten since he’d been delivered to her.

She considered going back to her quarters – she certainly wouldn’t mind a shower – but decided to wait out the night. Some instinct told her to be there when he woke up, and situations like this certainly never suffered from the subjects spending constant time together. So, instead of slipping out, she brought the chair over from the other side of the room and sat down, bringing her knees up into her chest so she could rest her feet on the edge of the seat.

Then she considered the man in front of her. He was breathing deeply and evenly for the first time in hours.

By the morning, he would have returned to himself, and the utter breaking that she’d gone to some much trouble for would be mostly repaired. Mostly, but not entirely. And each time, each time she shattered him – whether with kindness or violence – he would repair himself a little different. A little more in her image and a little less in his own. Until, one day, he’d have knit himself together so many times that he’d have forgotten the original pattern. What would be left would be something new. Not entirely Agent Clint Barton. But not entirely something else either.

She rested her chin on her knees, pulling her legs in even closer to her body as she contemplated her target.

“Don’t worry, Clint,” she whispered. “I know you’re not stupid. Unfortunately for you, neither am I.”

***

It was amusing to watch him wake up. As she’d predicted, he’d slept for several hours and then woke with a start. The suddenly movement drew out a cry of pain, and he slumped back into the bed.

“Hoping it was a nightmare?” she asked.

“Waking up is a nightmare no matter where it happens,” he quipped.

Silence then. He had his face turned away from her, obviously unwilling to face the vulnerability of last night, but she had no intention of rubbing his nose in it. She stood up and returned the chair to its place on the other side of the room, and then walked over to the bed. She climbed up to stand on it, balancing carefully, and stepped over Clint so she was on the side of the bed that was flush with the wall.

She sat down, positioning herself just at the arch in Clint’s back, and carefully stretched her legs out over him to put her feet on the other side of him, bending her legs to keep from tortuously brushing up against his skin. It made her legs into a bridge over his back, and she leaned back against the wall, settling in.

“So,” she said, looking down at Clint, who was now facing toward her by default. “Let’s talk about you.”

She could feel the caution seep into his body, obviously expecting this to be the moment that she started asking him about SHIELD.

“Tell me a story.”

“About what?” he asked cautiously.

“About something that happened to you. Like, a crazy mission or one of those days where everything went wrong. Something that isn’t in a file anywhere. Something about you.”

“Um…one time this lady tried to make me kidnap her baby?” He paused after that, concerned that he’d misunderstood what kind of story she was looking for, but that had been exactly what she wanted.

“How does that happen? Not just ‘take’ the baby, but actually kidnap it?”

“Yeah, sort of. I turned out later that she’d actually already kidnapped the baby in the first place.”

“So it’s wasn’t her baby?”

“No, it actually really was her baby.”

Natasha laughed, letting herself actually smile in the chaos of the attempted conversation. “My god, I’m so confused already. What the fuck?”

“You’re telling me.” He seemed cautiously optimistic, and more than a little amused, about his own narrative. “So, I learned later that she’d lost custody of the kid, who was about six months, and had apparently decided the ruling was unfair. So she climbed _three stories_ up the outside of an apartment complex and climbed in the window of the kid’s nursery. Then she took him and bolted.”

“What the fuck does that have to do with you?”

“She needed a patsy,” Clint snorted. “She wanted to hand the kid off to someone who would run with it, and then she could say that the father had been negligent and allowed kidnapping and she could sweep in and be the hero and get custody back or whatever the hell she thought would happen.”

“My god, what’s wrong with people?”

“Yeah well, it wasn’t an awesome day for me. You think cops are really patient with a strange man holding a kidnapped six month year old? It all got sorted eventually, but I definitely spent the night in jail.”

“Wait, you took the kid?”                             

“A strange woman screamed ‘catch!’ and literally threw her baby at me, of course I took the kid.”

Natasha let herself laugh again. Something about the image was hilarious to her, this picture of Clint’s face of distaste as he caught a flying, pin-wheeling baby.

“I can see we’re going to have fun,” Natasha sighed in contentment. “If that’s normal life for you, I can’t image some of the disasters that must have happened with you on missions.”

Clint was silent after that, obviously having no intention to spend enough time here to allowed them to become that familiar with each other. Also, having no intention to recall missions anecdotes, lest she use them to trick him into revealing something classified from one of them.

“Your turn,” he said, eventually.

She slapped her hand down on his back, open handed and heavy, and he arched his back with the sudden pain, involuntarily worsening it of his own accord. He let out a choked-off scream, then whispered “shit, shit, shit,” to himself quietly.

“I’m in charge of this conversation, Clint,” she reminded him. “If you want a story, you ask correctly.”

“May I have a story, _ma’am_?” he seethed, sarcastically emphasizing the title.

She took it anyway, twisting around to lean down and kiss the unmarked nape of his neck.

“Better,” she said.

Lip service was fine with her. Body first, heart second.

“How does it feel?” she asked.

“Fucking hurts.”

“How does it hurt? Be more specific.”

She watched him struggle with the natural urge to throw snark at her. However, while he was recovered enough to reconnect with reality, he still didn’t want to cross back to the other side of the room any time soon. Not if he could help it.

“It burns,” he admitted. “It burns everywhere. God, it even burns in the places you didn’t get me.”

“I didn’t want to make it this bad,” she reminded him. “We’ll get you a transfusion in a bit. At least some fluids. Maybe something to eat.”

“Something to eat? As in, something to chew, or something else through the IV?” he asked.

“You want something to actually eat? Maybe I can arrange that. Although I think we both know that that’s the kind of thing you earn.”

They sat in silence for a moment, each considering the weight of those words, and then Natasha broke the silence.

“A story hmm? I don’t feel like telling one about me, so how about one in general? Or, wait, I’ll compromise. This is one I heard as a child. I still think about it sometimes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a heads up, my next chapter won't be till Friday, because I've got an exam Friday morning. See ya then!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh god, this chapter is so short. And nothing interesting happens in it at all. I'm so sorry. It's just, this test really took it out of me. I've been awake for more than 30 hours. This is all I could do. I'm going to bed now, and I'm not going to wake up for a year.
> 
> I hereby PROMISE to make it up to you on Sunday. That chapter is gonna be so long, I s2g. I have fantastic things planned. They will all happen. All I'm going to do this weekend is write.

“Once upon a time,” Natasha began, trailing her fingers up and down the untouched skin on Clint’s sides, “there was a little girl, whose father went away on a long journey. While he was away on this journey, he became terribly lost, and he slowly lost all hope of returning to his home and to his daughter. He was tired and cold, and he had been separated from all his companions. Then, just when he'd lost all hope, he stumbled upon a castle in the middle of the wilderness. When he pushed on the gate, he expected it to be locked against him, but found it pushed open easily, and he was amazed to find a flourishing garden in the middle of winter."

"This is beauty and the beast," Clint interrupted, earning himself another slap, this times on his thighs. It got blood on her hands, and opened up some more of the wounds. The sheets would need to be changed, and more antibiotics would need to be administered. Probably through the IV, if she wanted to be safe.

"All I'm requiring from you right now," she said, "is that you lay here quietly and listen to me. I could definitely make this worse. Also, it's not your weird American version of the story. This is the Russian version, so shut up and learn something."

She cleared her throat and continued, again soothing the skin on his side with her blood-covered fingers.

"Anyway, as you apparently know, the man felt compelled to pick one of the most beautiful flowers for his daughter, in a vain hope that he would ever see her again. As soon as he did so, he felt a chill come over him, and a strange voice whispered in his ear.”

Natasha moved suddenly, clamoring up - only partially mindful of Clint’s injuries as he laid spread out underneath her - and shuffled on her hands and knees toward the head of the bed.

“A stranger in my garden,” she hissed softly in Clint’s ear. “How presumptuous of you, to touch what is mine.”

Then she giggled and nipped at Clint’s ear, before she returned to her previous position.

“The man turned around,” she continued, “to find a giant snake dripping from a large tree. Of course, the man was terrified, and offered his most heart-felt apologies. However, the damage was done, and the giant creature would only be satisfied by the merchant’s daughter. He demanded her in payment for the man’s life. The merchant, judging this to be a fair exchange, agreed, and the snake gave him a ring that allowed him to teleport home.

‘However,’ the snake reminded him. ‘If you do not give the ring to your daughter, then I will be forced to come and find you.’

The merchant, coward that he was, didn’t even tell his daughter the story of his misadventure. Instead, after teleporting to his home, he presented the ring to his daughter as a gift, and she quickly put it on her finger in gratitude. Naturally, she was then whisked away without warning to the monster’s palace. While her life there did not turn out to be so horrible, she was concerned by the fact that every night the snake slept a little closer to her bed. And she turned out to be very justified in this concern, because one night the beast climbed into her very bed, and she was powerless to stop him. At first she was terrified and angry and disgusted with her life in the snake’s palace, but eventually – knowing she could do nothing to change it – she allowed her days to continue at a languid pace, until she suddenly woke up one day and discovered she was happy. In this moment of joy, she leaned down and kissed the snake, and was startled when he immediately transformed into a handsome prince. And then they were all happy or something. I forget some of the bits sometimes. So, the end.”

“That’s a fucking horrible story,” Clint said.

“It’s Russian,” Natasha responded. “And to prepare young girls for arranged marriages. What did you think was going to happen?”

“I like the version I grew up with much better, thank you very much. No wonder you turned out like you did, hearing things like that before you went to bed.”

“Oh?” she asked, raising one eyebrow and reaching out to tilt his head down a little more toward her. “And how do you think I turned out?”

She watched him war with truth and sarcasm, until his final answer was, “A conniving survivalist with a penchant for destructive psychotic behavior.”

“Hmmm,” Natasha hummed, leaning down to kiss his temple. “But couldn’t the same be said of you?"

Then she climbed off the bed, smug at his lack of a comeback, and didn’t say anything more as she Clint alone in the room.

***

When she tried to sleep that night, she just laid in the dark instead. Clint was hardly “breakable,” by any stretch of the imagination. He’d been playing along with her because he was waiting to be saved, and she knew it. It would have been her own move, in any sort of similar situation. Of course he wanted to play nice. Of course he wanted to tell stories and narrate some of his own. Every moment that he spent doing nothing but breathing and thinking about SHIELD was a moment that he wasn’t really listening to her.

Not that she was angry. It was a natural defense mechanism, after all.

What she really needed was a way to make him realize that no one was coming for him. In two parts, preferably. On one hand, she’d convince him that SHIELD thought he was dead. And then, in the second part, she’d convince him that no one had wanted him in the first place.

The second part would be the longer road, that much was sure. However, at the same time, it would be the more rewarding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to disclaimer that this is not actually the way the Russian version of Beauty and the Beast goes. Natasha is letting her own childhood and world view obscure the story.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for narratives of domestic violence.  
> Also, I want to disclaimer that Clint is an unreliable narrator. Battered woman and battered man syndromes are real and powerful things, and I'm not discounting them, nor am I attempting to insult those who have experienced and/or escaped them. But Clint is angry and bitter and doesn't have the best conceputalization about all of this.

She spent a lot of the night accidentally keeping herself from sleeping. Even as she lay in the dark, exhausted after the string of long days, she found herself musing on Clint, bringing her back from the edge of drifting off.

She would have to circulate a fake death video, that much was certain. No matter what, the idea that he might be rescued would keep him stable. The “light at the end of the tunnel.” Not to mention that SHIELD really did have an excellent track record of rescuing its Agents. It would be better for everyone if she convinced those who knew him that he was already dead.

Plus, there was always something psychologically damaging about watching a video of your body-double being killed. Some body dysphoria shit right there.

From there, her mind went to various forms of manipulation, to various forms of torture, and then, just as she was about to actually drift off, to Clint himself. The way his body had hung from the chains and the strange series of moments – contrived or not – between the two of them on the bed.

And then she was asleep, with an uncharacteristic feeling of tranquility hovering at the edge of the nightmares.

***

She spent the next couple of days being nice. Clint spent the next couple of days pushing the boundaries. He earned himself a few slaps and was condemned to only IV meals for the foreseeable future, but he had settled into the long-term waiting game, and was watching and waiting. Probably for the moment she’d actually untie him from the bed.

It couldn’t have been comfortable to keep the same position like that for days at a time, but it was probably overshadowed by the flayed skin and itchy blood. She’d been right about him needing a blood transfusion, going by his RBC count when she checked it, so she added that to the treatment regime.

Oddly, the quick sutures she’d throw into his skin hadn’t been the hardest part of the few days. Instead, the cold hose-shower had been his least favorite part, by far. Not trusting him, even in his injured state, she’d left him tied to the bed and hosed him down. Gently – not wanting to have to sneak more blood transfusions from medical – but not kindly.

The bed had taken forever to dry, and he’d been a shivering mess for the majority of the day, shifting slightly to try and get away from the inevitable damp. That was the moment that she’d physically seen him decide to open his mouth and say something he’d regret. So she bent down and covered his mouth with her hand.

“Do you need me to gag you again?” she whispered in his ear. “I don’t mind you asking for help being good, but if you think you’re going to say something stupid, you should reconsider what’s more important to you.”

Unexpectedly, he kept his mouth shut when she’d pulled her hand away. He certainly was a lightswitch, either all sass or all compliance. Like fight or flight. All anger or all jokes.

It was possibly indicative of an abusive childhood. His file had said something about that, she remembered. It hadn’t been very detailed, though, indicating it wasn’t something Clint was very open about. Rather, it was a bare-bones warning to expect poor reactions to abusive language and behavior.

She laughed to herself at that, as she finished replacing the bandage on Clint’s back.

“What’s so funny?” he mumbled from where he’d buried his face in the pillow to keep from screaming out.

“I just decided on what we’re going to do today. Especially since you’re not really bleeding anymore.”

“Hang on,” he protested. “Doing today? Like something else psycho? I’ve been playing by all of your rules!”

Which was part of the problem. It was difficult to break someone who didn’t present the opportunity to be rent. She’d have to lay into him a different way. And she knew exactly how.

“Yes, you’ve been very good,” she said, smiling down at him. “That’s why I’m going to give you a choice. We can do today’s activity right here, right on the bed. Or we can move it across the line and make it more formal.”

Clint thought about it for a long moment, while Natasha traced gentle circular patterns on the back of his knee.

“What’s the catch to doing it here?” he finally asked.

“Over there will be more about pain and control, but I won’t require anything from you except respect. If you stay here, I will promise that you won’t even bleed, but you have to talk with me. Have a conversation.”

She watched him weigh the risks and benefits of each, still tracing her fingers behind his knee, but she suspected she knew which he’d choose. To ensure it, however, she leaned down and added, “I guess I should add, no matter how disrespectful you might get, I’ll keep the agreement. You’ll stay on this side of the line, and I won’t draw blood. I won’t even break anything.”

He was staring across the room at where his blood still stained the concrete floor. She had cleaned and put away the cane and the whip, but the rest of the system was still sitting there, ready for him and right in front of his eyes.

“If you want to go back, I won’t be mad,” she added. “I won’t go soft just because you’re already injured, but I won’t be mad. Sometimes people just need to be in pain. I understand.”

“Stay here,” he said.

“It’s ‘I’d like to stay here, please.’ ”

“I’d like to stay here, please.”

“All right then.” She kissed the back of his knee where she been trailing her fingers and then stood up. “Let’s get you flipped over then. And, please, Clint, don’t ruin everything and try to make a break for it. Do I need to write down what will happen again, or do you believe me?”

“There are no lies in this room, right?” he said, smiling grimly. “Afraid I can’t make that kind of a promise.”

She was torn. On one hand, that was the first time he’d voluntarily echoed her. More than that, he’d properly applied the concept, and _chose_ to avoid her request rather than to break her rule. Then, on the other hand, he’d practically just told her he was about to make a break for it.

She went for the blindfold.

She didn’t _know_ that it would freak him out, but she could guess. Hell, blindfolds were easily her least favorite thing, and she wasn’t a sniper. Especially not a sniper like Hawkeye.

Sure enough, as soon as he saw what she was bringing toward him – it was hard to miss given that it was a large one designed to cover the entire upper face – he turned his head away from her.

“Don’t,” was all he said, but his entire body tensed like he was ready to tear at the thick leather that was holding him spread eagle on the bed.

“This isn’t a punishment, Clint. It’s not going to be permanent. Just for a few moments to help you obey. I understand why you’re upset, but you asked me for my help. Lift your head.”

He didn’t so much as twitch, and she sighed heavily.

“Clint if you don’t let me put this on you, then I will force it on you, and then it will stay there for the duration of our activity today.”

“I’m not going to try and run.”

“That had better not have been a lie,” she warned.

“It wasn’t a lie. God, I swear. I know the door is locked. I know there’s a whole base between me and freedom. I know I’m injured and you’ll get me before I get three feet, and I know you’ll use it as an excuse to flay me again. I’m not going to run.”

“I don’t need an excuse if I decide to flay you. And I’m more than happy to hear you have no intention to run right now, although I suspect that that will change with the moment. It’s inevitable. Now, lift your head.”

He didn’t move, and Natasha finally accepted that he wasn’t going to. She took his hair with one hand and wrenched his head up off the mattress, slipping the large blindfold on quickly. She held him still with one hand while she buckled the straps to keep him from rubbing it out of place with the movement of his head.

Then, before he could orient himself, she unbuckled the ties on his far hand and dragged it over to re-buckle it to the closer post. The movement was quick and sudden and unanticipated. It twisted his body roughly, causing him to scream, as his lower body stayed flat but his upper body had to half turn to accommodate the new position.

She didn’t wait to give mercy or soothing words either. She just repeated the movement with his other hand. He did resist her, but not with any purposeful activity, and Natasha graciously chalked it up to a reflexive attempt to avoid the pain.

And it was probably a lot of pain. His upper body was laying on its back, twisted around and vibrating with the effort it took to keep at least some of the pressure off his spine and shoulders, because his legs were still tied as though he were face down.

He started thrashing, in a blind panic, and Natasha had to hurry to repeat the series of movements with his legs, so he wouldn’t reopen his stitches and ruin her promise to not make him bleed.

Once she’d gotten him flipped the rest of the way however, he kept thrashing, and Natasha was suddenly struck with the desire to take the blindfold off to calm him down. But she wasn’t about to undo all the work she’d done over the last weeks, so she stifled the urge, moving back to his head instead.

“Shhh, I’m right here,” she soothed him. “I know you can’t see me, but you can hear me, right?” She tapped on the metal bed with her fingernails, letting the rhythmic ringing assure him that her body was where he thought it was.

“Please take it off now,” he said.

“If you had lifted your head when I asked, it would already be off. But you know how this works, Clint. You’ve assured me that you’re not stupid on several different occasions. You get what you earn with me.”

“Yeah?” he said, with a bitter twist to his lips. “Well, what do I have to do to earn my way out of here.”

“Don’t fret. I’m sure you’ll do it eventually,” she said, turning the attempt at sarcasm into a foreboding threat; telling him that he’d inevitably comply with her enough that she’d trust him to leave and then to return.

It’s an easy thing to trust your convictions when you’re surrounded by people who agree with you. When you’re safe and with other people, and when you’re all working toward the same goal. It’s easy to stand tall in moment like that and say, “I would never…” whatever it is that is so opposite your definition of “you.”

And then, when you’re alone in a small room and no one seems to care much what happens to you at all, you find your definition of “you” is not quite so secure and unchanging as you’d been led to believe.

_I wouldn’t betray them._

_That depends on how long it’s been since you’ve seen them._

At least he was breathing more easily now. Shallow breathes, but steady ones. He wasn’t as pale as he’d been a few moments before, and she judged it was safe enough to walk to the other side of the room for what she needed. Then, returning to the bed, she laid a manila folder the floor next to the bed, and then stood up and twirled the riding crop she’d fetched.

Having recovered from the initial panic of being blindfolded, Clint was clearly considering his new position. If he’d thought he’d been vulnerable bent over the chair for his caning, then he was being introduced to new levels with this one; on his back, spread eagle, and displaying everything for Natasha.

“Now,” she began. “Last time we spoke, aside from discussions about your health, we exchanged anecdotes. Today, I want to talk about you specifically. Pointedly. For starters, why don’t you tell me about your childhood? What was it like for you, growing up?”

“Wonderful,” Clint said. “Long days outside and home-made dinners waiting for me. Parents who listened when I talked, and an excellent socioeconomic status. Perfect education. Ten out of ten, would recommend.”

“I’m going to do you a favor and assume you’re being sarcastic, rather than lying. Try again.”

Clint sighed heavily. “What do you want me to say? I had a crappy childhood, then I ran away and fucked my life up even more. SHIELD saved my ass.”

“I’m actually interested in all of those parts. You say you had a crappy childhood. How so?”

“Almost everyone has a crappy childhood. I don’t suppose there was anything particularly terrible about mine, I just didn’t like it. I was a little shit who didn’t know it could get worse.”

“Didn’t know what could get worse?”

“God, what do you want?”

Natasha laid the first strike of the crop into Clint’s thigh, close enough to his balls that he felt the threat through the sting of actual contact. She was almost amused to find he had developed the beginning of an erection. Whether is was from the strike of soft leather or from the exhibitioner position, she didn’t know. Either way, she was pleased to see the slip in control.

“Fuck,” Clint breathed out, working through the pain and drawing Natasha’s attention back to the matter at hand.

“I asked you a question. You’re stalling.”

She ran the soft leather of back and forth along the inside of his thigh where she’d just struck, and Clint’s mouth worked for a moment, then shut. So she struck again, this time clipping the edge of his ball sack, and he made a choking noise.

“Give me a minute!” he wheezed, when his lungs were cooperating again. “I’m trying to figure out an answer.”

“No,” Natasha corrected him, repeating the strike in the same place and way, and then talking over his cry. “You’re trying to figure out an answer that placates me but doesn’t give me anything you don’t want me to have. Answer my question.”

“I forgot the question,” Clint panted, then reflexively tried to jerk his legs together, anticipating another strike.

“Doesn’t sound like my problem,” Natasha responded, striking anyway, although lower down the leg this time. He still jumped, startled by the new location and unable to see what was coming at each moment.

“It sucked cause we were alone,” he spat. “And when we weren’t alone we wished we were.”

Natasha removed the crop and instead rubbed gently at the reddened welts she’d raised, soothing them with her cool soft fingers.

“Go on,” she prompted. “What does that mean?”

“Dad liked to drink, and mom couldn’t stop him. Same old, same old. Like every other goddamn house on our street.”

“Who’s we? You said ‘we were alone,’ Who’s the other person in that?”

Clint didn’t answer, turning his mouth down like he was upset with himself for the slip of the tongue. Something in the set of his mouth made Natasha realize it was time to change the rules, so she took away her hand and struck him several times. She started on the outer leg, and then slowly moved inward, up toward his genitals. She didn’t stop when she reached them, placing the stinging strikes on his cock and balls, and then moving down the other leg, all of it regardless of Clint’s protests and thrashing.

“I don’t care who it is, except that you won’t answer the question. What do you think I’m going to do? Go and find them? I don’t give a shit about them. This is about you and me, so answer the question, or I’ll repeat that pattern. I will repeat that pattern until you give me what I want.”

Clint pursed his lips together, twisting his wrists in his bonds and working hard to regulate his breathing. So Natasha kept her promise and laid down another string.

“I could be asking about your coworkers,” she reminded him. “We could be playing with knives and fingers while I demanded Agent locations and secrets. But I just want you, and you’re being childish about it.”

“My brother,” Clint said.

“And your brother’s name was?”

“Please don’t make me. Look, I know you can make me, I know. I don’t care as much about it as those other things you said, so I know I’ll tell you if you make me, so please just don’t make me.”

“Along the same lines,” Natasha insisted gently, “you could also not make me. Just give it without that push.”

No response. So Natasha pushed. She had to give his cock special attention with the crop – the mild erection he’d begun wilted completely – before he finally gasped out, “Barney.”

“Full name, Charles Bernard Barton,” Natasha said, satisfied. “If I’m remembering correctly.”

Clint stilled in reaction, which was different from previous times she’d surprised or unsettled him. He’d usually tensed in the past, turning his body into a vibrating mass of coiled muscle. This was just stillness. The first moment of actual fear.

Oh, he’d feared her before. Feared her when she held the whip. Feared her when she held the blindfold.

But this was fear of her. Just her. The weaponless version of her. The fear that even reading her files and memorizing her tactics hadn’t bestowed on him.

_You are alone with me._

She didn’t move or speak, letting the beautiful moment sink in. Letting him think about her, hovering right next to his skin, with all of her attention all about him.

“So why are you asking questions you already know the answer to?” he asked cautiously.

“I told you, I will always already know. I also told you that this was about you and me. So, you said your father drank and your mother couldn’t stop him. Tell me about your mother.”

“She was fine. She was just a mother.”

“Just a mother? And you’re mad at her for not stopping your father from drinking?”

“She was weak. She made choices all the time that were just weak.”

“Because she didn’t stop Harold from drinking?”

“Fuck. Yeah, sure. Yes.”

“Did you stop him from drinking?”

“I…no….I don’t. I was a child. Like some fucking kid is going to be able to stop his father, his own _father_ , from drinking. Barney couldn’t stop him either.” He was twisting in his restraints again.

“Why did you want him to stop drinking?”

“Same reason any stupid kid wants their dad to stop drinking. Thinking they know better and wanting to change things that make them unhappy. I just…I was just a kid and I didn’t know any better.”

Natasha laid a particularly vicious strike to his balls that took him several moments to recover from.

“What did I say?” he gasped eventually. “I didn’t fucking say anything.”

“You’ve been discounting your experience from the start, saying things like ‘it didn’t matter’ and ‘like every other house on our street’ and it’s pissing me off. You think there aren’t things I could be doing elsewhere? I _chose_ to be here with you, right now. I’m here on purpose.”

“Sucks for me.” And then another reflexive attempt to protect himself. This time, however, she didn’t lay down another welt. This time she soothed his leg softly.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Clint. Because so far you’re creating a picture of your childhood that makes me think I’m looking down at a frightened boy who never had anyone listen to one goddamn thing he ever had to say.”

“I’m not a boy,” Clint muttered petulantly, earning himself an open-palm slap to his thigh, enough to sting but not really anything other than a gentle reminder.

“I’m listening to you, Clint. I will always be listening to you. And at times, that might ‘suck for you’ as you say. But I think that, once you get used to it, it’ll be a relief. I will always listen to you, Clint. Always. And right now, I’m asking you to tell me about your father. And when you answer, I will believe you. I will listen.”

She kissed his welts gently, moving up his thigh and covering her teeth with her lips so she could nip at the tip of his cock without hurting him, and then finishing up the line down his other thigh.

“I’m sorry about your childhood,” she said, speaking the words into the warm skin of his thigh. “I’m sorry your mother was too frightened and broken to help you. I’m sorry your brother, though you seem to love him, couldn’t do it either.”

He shivered. A whole body shiver that started at his shoulders and traveled, uncontrollable, down his body. Natasha let the subsequent smaller tremors subside, and then drew back, smug to see his erection was returning. Not that it would be there for long.

“Now,” she said, standing up again. “Tell me about your father.”

“He was an abusive bastard and everyone knew it. And no one did anything about it.”

“What did he do?”

“What didn’t he do? He used belts or electrical cords or whatever else he could grab with his thick grubby fingers. And then he hit whoever wasn’t quick enough to hide in places he was too drunk to reach.”

“I hear you like heights to an unnatural degree, even for a sniper. I got the tip that you take the high ground even when slightly lower ground has more cover. That have anything to do with hiding from your father?”

He hesitated, obviously concerned that this was going to lead back around to an interrogation about SHIELD, and she used the crop to remind him of who was controlling the conversation.

“Probably,” he admitted then. “I don’t know. People don’t tend to look up very often. It’s not in their nature. Especially if they’re drunk enough to get vertigo.”

“How old were you when you left home?”

“Um…eight?”

“Why?”

“Car crash.”

That one was a surprise. It hadn’t been in his file, even though hints of his father’s abuse had been. She’d assumed he’d run.

“And then?” she pressed, not wanting to reveal too much with her questions, now that she was in territory she was unfamiliar with.

“The orphanage, I guess.”

So the crash had killed both his mother and his father. Leaving him and…Barney? Had Barney been killed in the car crash, too? She cursed herself silently. She’d just used the present tense when talking about Barney. If he was dead that had been a serious misplay, and one Clint was holding close to his heart, given that he hadn’t corrected her.

Or, she reminded herself, it was possible that he was still alive, and everything was fine. She forced herself to calm down, again pushing the sudden mental image of the failure in Belgrade out of her head.

Either way, she decided to abandon that particular line of questioning, and to move into something little more touchy.

“And thus began the series of events that brought you to SHIELD,” she continued. “Tell me about SHIELD.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

It was his first flat refusal. He’d resisted and tried to avoid, but that was a flat no, and she punished him for it. She stopped talking to him, and just struck a steady pattern in the same line she’d been doing before, only repeating it several more times without mercy.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he whispered to himself, as she approached his cock, tensing his body and trying to shift his hips away from her. The whole thing was worsened by the persistent deep pain in his back, and he mostly just settled for involuntarily tensing up his body each time she came through for another pass.

After a while, she entertained herself by pausing after finishing a line, waiting until he believed she was done, and then starting again.

He didn’t actually give in, at any point, and she hadn’t expected him to. She just went until he started making little whimpering noises as she approached his cock and balls, which would then rise into sharp little screams, just to fade away into whimpers again.

“I hadn’t even asked you the first question,” Natasha sighed, in mock disappointment. “But you just had to go right ahead and assume what I wanted to know. I already told you, Clint. This is about you and me. Now, how do you like SHIELD?”

Clint panted desperately, rubbing his head reflexively against his arm as he tried to dislodge the leather blindfold.

“Clint,” she warned. “A riding crop doesn’t take as much physical exertion. I could go for an awfully long time.”

He threw his head back on the bed in frustration.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I like SHIELD fine.”

“Why?”

He actually thought about that one, and she knew he’d started thinking about what he’d said earlier, about bringing her in to SHIELD to beg for mercy.

“Because they’re not stupid about their people. They don’t throw them away like trash. They mount rescue attempts and tell their Agents the plan beforehand. They prepare them. And they don't expect miracles, even if sometimes they ask for them.”

“Sounds nice,” Natasha hummed, gently rubbing the crop along the worse of the welts on Clint’s thigh. “So, they listen to you, then? Listen to your input?”

“Sure. They let me use my bow, and they let me chose my perch, and they always let me explain if I had to change something about the plan at the last minute.”

“Always?”

“Well, I mean, it’s a big organization. There are always exceptions. But they’re cool. I’ve worked under a lot of different organizations, doing a lot of shitty things, but SHIELD is cool.”

As he spoke, Natasha bent and picked the file folder up off the floor, opening it to the first page.

“Clint Barton is a danger to his team,” she read. “His reckless attempts at problem solving will get someone killed, either sooner or later. If his team is lucky, it will only be himself.”

“Sitwell is an ass,” Clint snapped.

“So, you remember that report then,” Natasha mused. “Did you know that it was prioritized, in your file. Meaning this was read by every commanding officer you’ve ever had. Every time you worked under someone new, this was the first thing they knew of you.”

Clint didn’t say anything.

“Clint Barton is the pickiest bitch I’ve ever had to work with. Nothing anyone does makes him happy. I don’t understand why he hasn’t been placed on solo work.”

“Don’t,” he said. Quietly and cut off quickly, like he hadn’t meant to speak.

“You remember that one then, too?”

Nothing.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Do you remember all of them, Clint? All the times they spoke about you? Every time someone casts judgement on you because you didn’t fit their understanding of capability?”

She leaned in closer.

“Did you know I’ve heard of you, Clint? Did you know that people here speak your name barely above a whisper, because there’s no dark corner of the walls that you can’t fold yourself away into. No distance you can’t take a shot from. They’re terrified that the slightest mention of you will draw your eye. You’re referred to with reverence and awe.”

“Meaning that they fucking hate me,” Clint tried to laugh, but he was clenching and unclenching his hands, and he didn’t seem to notice he was doing it.

“Isn’t that the greatest compliment? To be hated by your enemy?” She tossed the stack of files she’d been holding onto his stomach, and the papers slid everywhere in a chaotic pile, some of them remaining on his stomach, and others falling as far as the floor.

“Those are the mission reports your superiors and peers have submitted, detailing exactly what they think of you. I assure you, Clint, none of them speak of you with reverence. So…”

She paused in the middle of the sentence, allowing the unfinished part of it to weigh itself down on him. Making him consider the possibilities of her next words. Guessing games.

“Tell me how you feel about SHIELD,” she finished.

“It’s fine,” Clint said automatically. “It’s…fine. Everything’s fine.”

Natasha seized onto the slight hint that he was breaking from reality. Heaven knew he hadn’t been getting either enough food or water for his current state, and blood loss wasn’t helpful either. He’d started off on low ground, and she’d worked very hard to rip away that little bit of stability he had.

“Everything is not fine,” she hissed. “Everything has fallen apart and you’re lying there, legs spread open, trying to hang on to some decision-making paradigm that has long been obsolete. You’re hurting yourself, and it’s killing me. Why, Clint? Why this strained loyalty to SHIELD, when no one there was listening any more than your father was?”

“No. _No_! Just because there were a few assholes…you can’t…there will always be assholes. Everywhere. But I felt safe there. They keep you safe there.”

“They mount rescue attempts for everyone,” Natasha said, repeating his earlier point.

“Yes!”

“Except you.”

“I…what?”

“You’ve been here weeks, Clint. Where are they?”

There was a very long pause then. Clint shut his mouth tight in a twisted painful line, and Natasha knew, without a doubt, that if she ripped the blindfold off in that moment, he’d be crying.

“I want to go to the other side of the room,” he said quietly. “Please. Please can we do a session, instead?”

“Tell you what,” Natasha decided. “If you can answer two more questions, we’ll be done. That’ll be all. Just two more truthful answers, and we’ll be done. Then, if you still want a session, I’ll consider it. If you’ve changed your mind though, I’ll say no more about it.”

“Ok.” Weary. God, she hadn’t thought a single syllable could have so much weariness.

“First question. I want you to tell me the worst thing your father ever did to you.”

It was a perfect time for the question. He wouldn’t have given the real answer to her before. Or, worse, he might not have remembered it immediately. The human mind tended to skirt painful memories, when it could. But broken open like this? He was perfect.

“The cigarettes,” Clint said, without the slightest hesitation. “No one else was home. I didn’t think he was home either, and then I accidentally woke him up, and he held me down and burned his cigarettes all up my arm. Dot after dot after dot. I screamed and screamed and it didn’t matter. Screaming never helps anything.”

She touched his arm, carefully manipulating the skin until she found the line of little circles. They were almost invisible, having been made in childhood, and she hadn’t noticed them before.

“Second question,” she continued. “Were you happy at SHIELD?”

“No,” Clint said. “No, I’ve never been happy anywhere.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, look at all the violence.  
> Also, I would like to point out that it was TECHNICALLY still Tuesday when I finished this.

He hadn’t said anything when she’d gently turned him back over. She’d done it slowly, leaving him time to readjust his weight as she twisted his body. She even did one hand and then one foot, and then the others, meaning he was never completely twisted around.

He didn’t seem completely thrilled to be on his stomach, but it was better than leaving his weight on his flayed back. The welts would fade to gentle bruises soon enough, but those deep cuts would still need a few days before she’d be confident that they were healed enough to stay closed. Even longer before he’d be ready for the whip again.

When she pulled the blindfold off his face, wet with sweat and snot and tears, he tried to turn and bury his face in his arm, clenching his eyes shut against the light.

She took him gently by the chin, turning him to try and make eye contact with her, keeping his face there until he finally accepted it and opened his eyes.

“I think you handled that remarkable well,” she said. “Given the circumstances. I mean, I realize that you didn’t really have a lot to work with, but you managed quiet well regardless. Even if you did start off on the wrong foot with that blindfold. So get some sleep now, and we’ll see if we can get you something to actually eat in the morning.”

Clint didn’t say anything, and his eyes were looking at her, but they didn’t seem to be present. Just dead eyes staring in the general direction of her own.

_I know what you’re thinking._

She left for a moment, to fetch a warm cloth, and then returned to her position to gently clean his face.

_You want me to take away your choice._

Then she kissed his forehead gently, then his nose, and then his mouth. A chaste and quick closed-mouth kiss that he allowed with the complacency of a drugged man.

_Because if I’m the one who makes you do it, then somehow it isn’t your own fault._

“See you in the morning,” she said, and made sure to turn off the lights on her way out.

_No such luck._

***

There was a generic push and pull for a few days after that. Clint shut down for a while, probably out of some kind of self-hatred. It was an inevitable part of the process. As he fought his way down with each step, he’d find himself surfacing for periods of anger, confused at his own changing motivations. Honestly, she was surprised it wasn’t more violent.

Natasha responded by leaving him alone for long periods of time. She spent days doing her own thing, researching the organization’s ongoing missions and providing on-com assistance where it was useful. Beyond that, she studied. Sokovia was full of interesting developments, and she was working on the language. She was confident in her ability to communicate in a pinch, but she wasn’t anywhere near the fluency needed to pass for a native.

So she parsed sentences, and listened to recorded conversations, and play around in some online chat rooms, all of it while watching Clint on the cameras she had streaming to her tablet. Not that she didn’t visit him. She brought him real food, which she hand fed him, and changed his IV and bandages as needed.

She still hosed him down intermittently, leaving him in a damp discomfort, but besides that, she worked hard to make sure her presence was calm and helpful. She smeared lidocaine all over his back, giving him relief from the pain, even though it was only topical and thus faded a few minutes after she’d left the room. She talked with him, telling him funny stories about things that had happened in the hallway, or even things that had happened to her on old missions. She even played with the room’s temperature, making sure it was nauseatingly hot or painfully cold when she wasn’t in the room.

It tore his anger to shreds. The enforced isolation, combined with the synthetic relief at her presence, soon had him perking up in excitement whenever she entered the room. It didn’t take more than two weeks before he was actively trying to engage her in conversation.

“Don’t leave,” he finally said one day, and then his mouth worked like he was trying to take back what he’d spoken.

For one heart-pounding moment, Natasha thought maybe he’d let it slide. That maybe this whole thing was going to be easier than she’d thought. That maybe Clint had been on the edge for a long time and he was just that ready to give up.

But the next second, his eyebrows drew together in sharp anger and he snarled up at her.

“Fuck you,” he seethed. “Fuck you, you psychopathic little bitch, what the _hell_ are you doing to my head?”

Natasha stared at him without saying anything. Honestly she’d been expecting this particular outburst the day after their game with the riding crop. This reaction, fueled by guilt and self-hatred, was an important next step.

Still, she sighed heavily when he added, “What is this, the only way you can make friends? News flash, the phrase ‘making friends’ isn’t literal.”

“Are you done?” she asked, when he didn’t say anything else.

“Why? You going to flay me alive again? Another news flash, my body can only take so much of that.”

Without warning, she reached across him and cut his hand free, doing the same with the other, and quickly moving down to free his feet as well.

He blinked at her, flat on the bed with nothing to hold him down, and hesitated for only the briefest confused heartbeat before he got one knee under him and launched himself at her. She took the rush of attack with ease, readjusting her footing and wrapping one arm around his outstretched one. She did get a bit of a shock when he pulled back quickly enough to free himself before she got the hold secured, but the fight still didn’t last long.

They were both assassins, but Clint was a sniper, training in hand to hand only as much as street fighting and the requirements of SHIELD had given him. Not that he was slow or stupid, but hand to hand was almost all Natasha had done since she was a little girl. She’d hadn’t spent the years learning to hide and climb and turn invisible as he had, but instead used them on the physics of her own body. She was the one who wore the red dress and snapped your throat when she caught your eye.

Clint was done the moment he managed to back himself into the wall. Then he was face first in the concrete with his arm twisted behind his back. She straddled his body, leaning down against where she held his arms so she was flush with his body, pressing into his barely-healed whip marks.

“Looks like we need to have a session,” she whispered, grinding her hips against his ass even as he scrambled to free at least one arm. Every time he tried to get one knee under him, she kicked it, and he slid back onto his stomach.

Eventually, he just lay there, panting.

She just waited.

At one point, he made a noise of frustration and slammed his own head down on the concrete.

She kept waiting.

She waited until his breathing was slow and steady. Until she was confident that he had stopped those intermittent resurgent escape attempts. Until he’d relaxed into a pool of still muscles beneath her. Until his eyes were hooded.

She waited a long time, but it was worth it to feel a pliant and calm Clint underneath her. Then she moved. Quick as she could move she was off him, dragging him the last couple of feet to the other side of the room. He did get his feet back under him pretty quickly, walk-stumbling the last few feet, and then he was where she wanted him.

She dead legged him, childish as it was, and then brought him all the way back down with one hand on his neck and the other on his arm. It hadn’t really been a resistance on his part.

She reminded him with her weight that he still wasn’t to move, and then proceeded to tie his wrists to the rings set in the floor. He tested the tie, pulling against it, each time she finished, but didn’t make any active attempt to free himself. He did hit his head against the concrete again. That one had been hard enough to bruise.

She moved and got his feet tied down, before she went to fetch was she needed from the back.

“So, what are we doing today. Ma’am.” Added as an afterthought, but added nonetheless.

She didn’t answer. In fact, she had no intention of responding to him at all, for this one. She wanted to do more than hurt him, she wanted to put him in flashback. She wanted to make him afraid of being somewhere that wasn’t here.

She’d had to specifically request cigarettes from her superiors, and the generic “to help with my latest project” almost hadn’t been enough to convince them.

She’d even hacked old credit card reports, to get the right brand. She hoped they still smelled the same.

“Look,” Clint continued from the floor. “I know I’ve ‘earned it’ or whatever, but you did let me go. I mean, that was like you’d asked for me to attack you. You practically told me to.”

It was a weak excuse and didn’t even address his earlier disrespect, but she appreciated that he was frightened enough to make an attempt.

She walked back over to him, sitting down on the floor next to his arm. Right arm. The same arm that was dotted with almost-gone scars. She placed the lighter down on the floor in front of her, and began opening the plastic on the box of cigarettes.

His eyes widened, and he panicked. The rings gave him a little more leeway than the bed had, and he thrashed around, shaking at the restraints again, only this time with the futile intention to free himself.

She continued unwrapping the plastic until she could throw it on the ground, off to the side. The box took her a moment, having never opened one before, but then that was ready, too, and she pulled out one long cigarette.

Clint had moved onto bargaining.

“Look, I’ll be good, ma’am. I can be good, please, I can. I know it seems like I can’t, but I can try so hard.”

She picked back up the lighter, and clicked it a few times, testing its functionality. Clint flinched violently every time, and twisted his shoulders in distress. It had been weeks since the whipping, and she was confident that his wounds wouldn’t reopen, but that didn’t mean they didn’t hurt. His adrenaline must have turned it to white noise.

She’d be sure and bring him back.

She held the flame up to the end of the cigarette, watching the flame waver around it, and then start to eat the paper. Then she clicked it off and returned the lighter to the floor in front of her. A brief examination of the end of the cigarette showed her that the red glow was evenly distributed.

“Don’t,” Clint begged. “Please just don’t. You can just not. Just decide to not.”

She didn’t even look at him, watching the glowing bits of embers with a face of utter boredom.

“You don’t have to,” he tried again. “God, _why_? Just, why, because you don’t have to. I’ll be good. Please.”

She shifted position, putting one knee on his upper back and the other on the floor by his arm. Then she pinned his arm down more securely with her free hand, and pinpointed one of the mostly healed scars.

“Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop,” Clint whined, his voice getting higher and higher.

She let the burning edge get close enough that he could feel the heat.

Suddenly, he shouted, “Red!” and Natasha almost jerked in surprise. She hadn’t known Clint had had any experience with pain-play, especially in a manner that would mean he had a safeword. And what an interesting moment to use it, when it hadn’t so much as crossed his lips during any of their other times together.

It was a good sign that she was inducing a flashback, if his mind was already somewhere else. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the somewhere else she was looking for.

She pressed the small circle of ember against the small circle of scarred skin and tensed her body for the reaction to follow.

The reaction came a moment after the contact. Brain struggling to catch up with body, in the face of such overwhelming sensation. And then he screamed. Screamed and writhed so hard that Natasha almost lost her grip and ended up pulling away the cigarette more quickly than she’d intended, not wanting to drag it across his skin.

The wound itself already looked ugly. Red puffy blistering skin. She tried to hold the skin still, at least, to get a better look at it, but Clint was still pulling at his restraints. In fact, she was pretty sure at least one wrist was bleeding, already rubbed raw.

She readjusted her position and sought out another scar. This one was at a better angle, and she was able to hold her position when Clint scream and thrashed again. Or, maybe he hadn’t screamed and thrashed as much, because – a moment later – his eyes rolled back in his head, and he faded for a few moments.

“Finally learning to shut up?” Natasha snapped, causing his eyes to flutter and then dart around, as if looking for something. He didn’t seem to be quite there.

“Wait,” he panted. “Wait, just wait a moment.” Then he blinked, and started screaming again, even though she hadn’t touched him.

She waited until he stopped again, then re-imprinted the next scar she’d found. This was going to have to be quicker than she’d expected. He’d sunk deep, and much more quickly than she’d anticipated. She’d even tried playing with the heat along his skin, teasing but not yet touching, and he hadn’t at all noticed the difference. He was completely gone.

“Barney!” he screamed, and Natasha was satisfied. It was all going more quickly than she’d anticipated, but it was still working. In just a few more minutes she’d let him surface, and she’d be the only thing there. His safe harbor as he ran from his fears.

Natasha searched for the second-to-last scar, ready to be done, and Clint just babbled. Until suddenly, his words made sense again.

“I can make you forgive me! I can! You’ll forgive me!”

And suddenly Clint wasn’t the only one in flashback. Suddenly she was eleven or twelve and very alone in a very dark room where she had been told she had been left to die.

_Find your own way out or die in there. Either way is fine with us. We don’t need a worthless little thing like you._

_I can make you forgive me. I can! I’ll make you forgive me._

Because even then she’d only known violence; to force them into forgiving her. Into wanting her.

She hadn’t thought she’d remembered that moment.

She also hadn’t thought she’d moved, but she suddenly found she was standing on the other side of the room, cigarette clenched and ruined in her hand, about to burn her in another second. She dropped it onto the floor.

Clint hadn’t seemed to realized she’d gone, and was still crying into the floor. He was mostly silently, except for the occasional sudden rasping of a drawn breath; multiple catches in the sound as he inflated his lungs against his body’s will.

She didn’t want to finish.

Her hand was trembling and Clint, in his thrashing about, had shoved the lighter to slide almost all the way to the other side of the room. She’d have to go all the way over there and get it, then light another cigarette, and then finish.

She didn’t want to, and she wasn’t sure if it was because she was still a little bit in that dark room or because she also suddenly remembered being sixteen and telling Iakov that she would never do to someone else what they had done to her.

Clint was still crying.

She went to get the cigarettes.

It took her three tries to light one.

She finished the last two burns in quick back-to-back succession and almost vomited at the smell of burning flesh.

Then it was done, and she moved to drop the lit cigarette into the sink, stomping out the one on the floor on the way. She untied Clint – he didn’t even seem to notice her presence – and forcibly carried his dead weight back to the bed, retying him quickly.

Then she left.

She didn’t stay and wait to see how quickly he came back to himself. She didn’t wait to see if he came back at all. She didn’t let herself be the first thing he saw and smelt and touched after his nightmare. She just disappeared, and locked herself in her room.

***

She was worried she’d undone all the work, when she came back. He turned his head into the wall and refused to so much as look at her. Pouting like a child, though it was hard to blame him for it.

The wounds themselves looked ugly and puffy, and she made that her first order of business. Leaving without caring for them had been irresponsible and irreverent.

“I told you that in confidence,” Clint said suddenly, and she was startled to hear him speak at all. She still didn’t respond though, continuing to gather the first aid from the back of the room.

He turned his head to look at her then. He looked terrible. Sunken eyes and a bleeding lip where he must have bitten it. She’d also been right about his head. It was bruised pretty badly.

“It was in confidence,” he said again, as though that might mean something.

“And?” she said calmly, as she kneeled beside him.

“And you used it against me.” He hissed as she wiped the first circle. Open wounds, especially burns, infected so easily. She really shouldn’t have left him.

_Irresponsible. Irresponsible. Irresponsible._

“You told me about your life,” she said, calm voice hiding her turmoil. “You gave that gift to me, and I was very grateful. I appreciate what it took for you to tell that story, no matter how short. But it was still a gift to me. As in, given away. It’s mine now, to do with as I please. If I want to hurt you with it, it’s mine to use in such a manner.”

She switched to the antibacterial ointment, keeping her movements shallow so as to avoid as much pain as possible.

“It’s not yours, it’s mine. It’s _my_ fucking memory.”

“Clint,” she warned, as she applied the bandage.

He buried his face in the bed and repeated, “it’s my memory, it’s mine” to himself, and Natasha didn’t see a reason to stop him. She’d moved onto the next burn.

It was the last thing he said, and she finished quickly, leaving again immediately afterward.

***

“Do you think I could untie you?” she asked.

She’d made sure she’d calmed herself down this time. All the way. She was in control of herself again, and ready to salvage what she could. Although she’d lost the interaction as a potential strengthening of their relationship, it had still acted as a way to make him fear her, and that was still useful.

“And what?” he asked wearily. “Have me walk to the other side of the room by my damned self?”

“Do you need a session?”

“No!” he said, too quickly to continue hiding his fear. He bit at his lip again, and then turned his face away from her.

“Because I’ll always do a session with you if you think you need it,” she continued, crouching down next to the bed. “No matter the inconvenience to me. You come first.”

“I’m sure I do,” he said wearily. “But no. I don’t want a session. I don’t need a session. I don’t ever want to cross over there ever again.”

“I’m sure you know that’s inevitable, though.”

He laughed bitterly. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose so, with you around.”

She took the opportunity to gently nudge his face to turn back around and look at her again.

“I’m not the one that makes you go over there,” she reminded him, gently stroking the side of his face.

_Always your fault. The pain is your fault. Not mine._

“Whatever.”

“Brining us back to the original question. Do you think I could untie you?”

“I’m sure you could untie me.”

“You are such a smartass,” she smirked. “Fine. Do you think I could untie you and you won’t try to do something stupid?”

The slight amusement that had shown on his face faded into generalized weariness, and he answered, “I kind of doubt it. Let’s just keep the status quo, no?”

She stood up and walked toward the back of the room.

“No!” Clint shouted suddenly. “No, no, no, please I didn’t say anything. I didn’t mean to say anything. Don’t make me go back over there.”

“You’re not in trouble,” Natasha called back to him. “In fact, I appreciate your honesty. I’m always happy when you speak the truth.” She came back carrying a small box and placed it on the bed next to him, kneeling on the floor so she was at face level.

“Why do I get the feeling that whatever you do next still won’t be something I like?”

“It probably won’t be. You didn’t like the blindfold either, but it kept you from doing something to get yourself in trouble.”

“Oh god,” Clint said, trying to crane his neck so as to be able to see over the edge of the bed, down to where Natasha had placed the box.

She obliged his curiosity, and pulled the oblong box into view. Holding it in front of his face, she opened it, watching his reaction when he saw the contents. Inside lay four long thin double-sided needles, being held still within ceramic grooves.

Clint’s eyes widened and he glanced back and forth from her face to the needles, back and forth, back and forth, until she couldn’t help but let out an amused laugh.

“Don’t laugh at me!” he gaped. “Where the fuck are those going?”

“Have someplace in particular in mind?” she teased.

“Natasha, I swear to god, if you put those up my dick--”

She cut him off by a real laugh, and she had to actually close the box and stand up to keep from falling over.

“I am not putting them up your dick, Clint,” she said when she finally managed to calm down. “Geez, what kind of stuff are you into that your mind went there?”

“Says the woman who horse whipped aforementioned dick not two weeks ago.”

“Close to three. But don’t worry. I have no desire to puncture your urethra. The nightmare that would be ug. No, thank you. I have zero desire to do permanent damage to you, and even the scars I give you are ones you forced my hand into.”

“So where _are_ you putting them?” he tried again cautiously.

“Here,” she said, rubbing the back of his thighs. “Enough fat here to keep from damaging muscle. Won’t make sitting down very fun, but I imagine you’d like to stand up anyway, after all the weeks you’ve been down. And then, they can act as a deterrent to future bad behavior.”

“And what happens if I yank them out?”

“Then we have a session.”

_There are no lies in this room._

“Fine.”

She’d expected a little more resistance, actually. She must have underestimated how much he wanted to get off the bed and stand of his own volition. Maybe he’d finally understood that they were playing the long game, and if he pushed too hard too often he’d only get broken on the rocks for his trouble.

She slipped on the sterile gloves – no good touching something with her hands when it was literally going into his body – and carefully picked up the first needle.

“Ready?”

“God, just do it, please.”

She obliged, pinching the skin, so as to get a good angle for where she wanted it, and then sliding the needle in slowly. There was a sharp gasp at its entry, and then a low whine as she pushed it slowly through the expanse of his thigh. She’d gotten the perfect angle, too. Shallow enough that she wouldn’t hit anything she didn’t mean to, but deep enough that it wouldn’t tear through the skin.

Eventually, the needle broke through the skin on the other side of the curve of his thigh. She made a few minute readjustments, and then drew back.

“See?” she said. “Not so bad.”

“Not so bad?” Clint echoed with incredulity.

“Not as bad as a punishment.”

“Well…still sucked, though.”

“Other side,” Natasha warned him, and picked up another needle.

He bore that was about as well, although he did start holding his breath halfway through. She noticed from the way he tensed his body, which only worsened the pain of the slow slide. And then that one broke through as well, and he let out his breath with a sharp gasp, panting and starting to sweat.

“All right,” she said. We’re done. She looked down at the pair of needles, each stretching horizontally across the backs of his thighs, only the tips visible on either side of each leg. “Do you feel like I can untie you?”

“What?” Clint said, trying to look down toward her. “There were two more needles.”

“Do you feel like you need the other two?”

“No! No, I…I can be untied. You can untie me.”

“Then I don’t think we need the other two. But I hope you aren’t lying Clint.”

“After finally earning the right to stand up? I don’t think I’m quite that stupid.”

“Standing up is a privilege, not a right,” she said, untying his feet and then moving up toward his head. “And I don’t think you’re stupid, Clint. Not overall. You just close your eyes sometimes, and then you end up doing very stupid things.”

He didn’t respond as she untied the other two ropes, and then she stepped back, watching him carefully. He moved slowly, fully aware of all his injuries, the needles in his legs only the most recent. She pulled of her gloves, one after the other, as he slowly got to his hands and knees.

“Fuck, that hurts,” he hissed through his teeth.

“Do you need help standing?” she asked. Adding, when it looked like he might refuse, “I can’t imagine it would be very fun to fall on your ass right now.”

That decided him, and he nodded.

“Out loud, Clint.”

“Would you please help me stand, ma’am?”

She walked over to him and hooked one of his arms over her shoulders and gently pulled him off the bed. It took him a couple tries to remind his legs what standing felt like, but he managed a wobbly version of it eventually.

“You don’t need to call me ‘ma’am’ over on this side, Clint.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine, you’re not in trouble. I just don’t want you to be afraid of failing to meet a standard that I’m not holding you to. I like to think I’m very clear about what I expect from you.”

“Compliance,” Clint said bitterly, trying to shake her off to stand on his own.

“No,” Natasha said gently, letting him do so and stepping back a little. She stayed close though, in case he fell. “Compliance isn’t the word. I want obedience.”

“It’s the same thing,” Clint replied.

“It’s really not,” she answered softly. So softly, in fact that he barely heard her. She stepped forward again, to whisper in his ear. “I don’t want your compliance, Clint. I want you. I want your childhood and your favorite moments. I want your fears and your hopes and your trust. I want your personality, not some whitewashed version of you trapped in your body.”

She held his face, gently sliding it back until she was cupping the nape of his neck, fingers wrapped in his hair. Then she tilted her head up, stood just a little bit on tip-toe, and kissed him.

It wasn’t like the first kiss she’d pressed to his lips; the one he’d taken like a rag doll. This time he responded on some reflex and parted his lips, hand reaching up to brush her hip on the way up to her face.

Even when he suddenly drew back, glaring at her with narrowed and frightened eyes, it somehow didn’t ruin the moment.

Which was bad.

Which was terrifying.

That night, Natasha sat alone on her bed, on top of the covers and leaning against the headboard. She kept touching her lips, gently.

It hadn’t even been quite three months. How had he gotten this far under her skin when she hadn’t managed to get him to do anything except stand up without attacking her?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe it’s time for them to play nice. Sometimes. For a while.  
> Also, goal for next update is Friday.


	6. Chapter 6

She actually laughed when she turned on the lights and saw how Clint had slept. He’d knelt next to the bed and leaned his chest over it, pulling the pillow down to the middle of the bed where his head was.

“Oh it’s like you’re asking for a spanking,” she snickered.

“Am not,” Clint shot back, but his voice was sleep-clogged and he was blinking rapidly, trying to find where she was in the room, and she smiled in---

_fondness_

Fine, it was fondness. She was allowed to be fucking fond of her pet. She was allowed to be amused. She was allowed…she was allowed to…

In fact, it would probably be good. He would sense the sincerity better than a full lie. It would help make him hers.

“You’re wearing jeans,” he said, when he finally seemed to wake up enough to focus on her.

“I am wearing jeans,” she agreed, coming into the room the rest of the way and closing the door behind her. She’d only ever wore her uniform in the room with him before, but had today opted for jeans and a over-sized shirt, coming halfway down her thighs and with sleeves so long they covered her hands.

“Why are you wearing jeans?” He had started to get to his feet, and she hurried over to push him back down to bend over again.

“I’m wearing jeans because I’m hoping today can be a calm day,” she explained, examining the needles. “I see you managed to find a way to sleep that wasn’t on your stomach.”

“I’m really tired of lying on my stomach.”

“You know, there’s probably a really inappropriate joke in there somewhere, but I’ll let you imagine the possibilities. You about ready to get these out?”

His head jerked around to look at her, and he raised his eyebrows.

“I can have them out?” he asked. And then his eyebrows drew together, expecting a catch.

“Do you need them to stay in?”

“No.” Quick.

“Clint,” she warned. “If you need them in, then I’m willing to leave them in. If you’re going to attack me and ruin this day, then I’d rather you just keep them. I can work around them, if it’ll help you.”

“No, I think I’m done trying to make a break from this particular cell, thank you.”

“From this particular cell?” she echoed, bracing one hand against the outside of his thigh and slowly drawing the needle out.

He didn’t respond to her for a few moments, fighting with the pain of the re-tearing of his flesh, since hours had passed, and his body had spent the time healing as best it knew how.

“Clint?” she asked again, allowing the warning in her voice to prompt him to gasp out, “Not gonna keep me here.”

“How so?” she asked pleasantly, once the needle had been freed.

“You’re training me for something,” he said, and he spoke with a smug triumph like he was so proud of himself, while she walked around and sat down on his other side. “I wondered for a long time, why me? Why did they take me, and bring me here, and dump me on you? So now I’m thinking that there's some job you need me for, but you wanna make sure I’ll do it.”

“Interesting,” Natasha commented, bracing her hand against the outside of his thigh again.

“S’just a theory,” he said, and then shut his mouth with a click when she began to draw the needle out. She let him keep his silence for that one, and eventually it was free as well. She walked over to place them on the table on the other side of the room, to be sterilized and returned to their box at a more convenient time.

“Just a theory?” she echoed him again.

“Yeah, but it’s the best one I’ve got right now. So I figure, that’ll be a better time anyway. I just have to wait until you need me more than you don’t trust me. Waiting for that status quo to change. Waiting out the clock.”

_There is no clock, Clint. It’s just you and me._

“Well, I’m glad to hear that you plan to play nice in here,” she said. “So how would you feel about a shower?”

He flinched away from her just slightly at that, and she hurried to lay a gentle hand on his back.

“I’m not talking about the hose, Clint,” she clarified. “I meant a real shower. There’s a showerhead in here for a reason. Warm water and everything. Real shampoo.”

“Oh my god.” He began to scramble to his feet, momentarily forgetting his injuries until he put his weight on his legs. Then he hissed in pain and went halfway back to his knees.

“Take it slowly, ok?” she laughed, holding her arms out in case he fell again.

When he’d managed to get to his feet again she took him by his right wrist, mindful of the bandages that still wrapped that arm, and drew him toward the shower.

It wasn’t encased in glass, but was a simple showerhead and drain, with a slight incline to the floor to encourage the water to stay away from where it wasn’t wanted.

Natasha twisted the valves on the piping and then held her hand out into the water to test its temperature, still keeping the other one encircling Clint’s wrist.

“How very ‘mother’ of you,” Clint said.

“I promised you warm water,” Natasha responded. “Warm water will be what I deliver.”

She waited until the temperature was to her satisfaction and finally let Clint’s wrist go. She stepped back and gestured to the stream.

“Go nuts.”

Clint didn’t need any more encouragement, stepping into the water and shuddering in ecstasy. He did sharply jerk his right arm out of the spray of water, once the bandages had begun to soak through to his burns.

“Here,” she said. “You just have to do it slowly.”

She stepped forward again, ignoring the water splashing onto her clothes, and took the offending wrist again, pushing it slowly back under the water.

Clint’s body stiffened, and he pushed back against her non-verbal instructions. So, Natasha took a moment to touch his shoulder gently. Her clothes were getting soaked.

“Clint,” she soothed. “They’ll feel fine once they’re used to the water. It’ll only be a moment. I know it’s uncomfortable, but it’s happening either way, no matter your opinion on the matter.”

He gave in grudgingly, hissing softly when the water reached the wounds. But Natasha was right, and it wasn’t even a minute before the pain had faded into the warmth of running water.

“See?” she smirked. “Isn’t that better?”

“Guess so,” Clint pouted. “Depends on your definition of better.”

She slapped his ass for that one, but playfully enough that it only hurt because of the needle wounds.

“Ow,” he complained. “That how this works then? I’m a smart ass and I get a smarting ass?”

And then, of course, he grinned at her like he’d just made the funniest joke in the damn world.

“You are a child,” she said, drawing away again. She'd completely soaked her jeans, and her shirt wasn’t faring much better.

“I’m a child?” Clint scoffed. “You’re acting all petulant that I’m a child when you’re the one who fucking spanked me. I’m getting some mixed signals here, _ma’am_. Gonna get real confused about what you want from me.”

When she didn’t respond he glanced over his shoulder to find her, and got an eyeful of the moment right when she pulled off her bra. His head snapped back around to face forward again, and that was definitely a blush she’d seen in the moment before he moved.

Which was just the most fucking goddamn adorable thing she’d ever seen. He’d been sporting around commando for the last three months without so much as a single comment about it. But one eyeful of boobs and he was practically writhing in discomfort.

“Uh…” he said.

“My clothes are soaked,” she scoffed. “And it’s cold out here after being under there. Scooch over.”

He startled when he felt her hands pushing at him, but moved without hesitation so she could squeeze in under the water as well.

“Oh wow,” she hissed. “Got it a little too hot, didn’t I?”

“I like it,” Clint said, and then stammered, “The water. I like the water. Fuck.”

“You’re adorable.”

“And you’re naked. What the fuck?” He was standing with his arms wrapped around his body and was inching slowly out of the stream of water, in an effort to avoid brushing up against her skin.

“I have touched almost every inch of your body,” she reminded him. “I have seen you bloody and broken, and I will likely see you that way again. I know what your scream sounds like when you cry out for your brother, even when he’s not coming. And you want to throw a fit over a little skin to skin contact? Jeez, Clint. I’m not asking you to eat me out. Get your ass back under the water.”

“Way to make it weird,” he muttered, but obligingly stepped back to his place.

“See? Again, isn’t that better?” she asked, flicking water at his face with her fingers.

“It’s certainly warmer.”

They bantered like that for almost an hour, huddled in under the hot water, at war with the cold air of the room. But eventually they tired of it, and Clint made a move as though to step away.

“I don’t think so,” Natasha said. “I said ‘shower.’ Not ‘stand under hot water.’ Hand me the shampoo.”

He reached over to the floor and picked up the bottle, handing it to her obligingly. She took it and squirted some of it out onto her hand, and placed the bottle back on the floor. Then she looked up at Clint.

“Look like you’re going to have to get down on your knees,” she informed him. “I can’t reach.”

“I can wash my own hair,” he protested, but Natasha just raised one eyebrow, and he sighed.

“Better,” she commented, as he kneeled in the warm puddle, water falling on his back.

“This wouldn’t be such a problem if you weren’t so damn short,” he muttered.

“Smartass,” she said, and slapped his face with her empty hand, hard enough to turn his head though not enough to throw his body out of balance.

Clint licked his lips, drawing the bottom one into his mouth for a moment, and then he grinned.

“I think you mean ‘smart mouth’, don’t you? ‘Smartass’ got my ass slapped. This was clearly a different offense.”

She slapped him again, but they both heard her snort of amusement.

“Hold still and shut up,” she ordered, mildly surprised when he actually stilled underneath her fingers.

His hair had grown a couple inches since his arrival. She’d barely been able to grip it then, but she could bury her fingers in it now. Card her fingers through it. Get a handful at tug his head around with it. Gently though, not sharp. Gently.

She worked the shampoo into his hair, careful to hold his head out of the way of the water, lest it all rinse out too soon. She was also careful to keep his head tilted enough to keep the soap from running into his eyes, even as she moved his head around.

She took her time, working and then rubbing and then massaging his scalp. Feeling the bumps in his skull, hidden underneath his hair. The skin moved back and forth, ever so slightly, and Clint couldn’t help but move his head with it just a little.

She scratched with her nails, making sure to get out all the layers of built up gunk. Sweat and blood that had been too caked on to be affected by the hose worked freed as she dug her nails into the scalp on just the right side of painful.

She smiled smugly when he dropped his head forward with a quiet moan of satisfaction, and she took the opportunity to massage the nape of his neck, teasing her nails over the sensitive skin.

“Close your eyes,” she ordered, as the suds began to drip with gravity.

He obeyed immediately, and she put one hand on his forehead and the other on the back of his neck and tipped his head back into the water, washing everything away.

He was so pliant. So goddamn pliant. His whole head moved with the slightest pressure. At one point, he seemed to loose his position in space and almost tipped over backwards. Natasha had to move her hand lower down on his back to catch him and draw him back into his upright position.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“S’thqueaky clean,” he slurred. Actually slurred. The words came out with a lisp and a half smile.

“Open your eyes,” she ordered, shielding them from the spray of water.

His pupils were blown wide, and he blinked up at her slowly.

“I’m going to turn off the water now,” she told him. “Stay here.”

She moved quickly, slightly concerned that he would fall over again, but managed to get back in time to avoid it. Then, with a little prompting, she got him onto his feet and walking to the bed.

“S’cold,” he complained.

“I know. We’re going to get you all wrapped up in your sheets.”

At least those were dry. And it looked like her clothes were mostly dry, too, so there was that. She got him wrapped up in the sheets, just like she’d said, and then pulled on her over-sized shirt, leaving the rest of it all to remain hanging over the headboard.

“Leaving?” he asked, and she shook her head.

“Nope. I’m climbing in there with you.”

Gods, it was cold out here. What temperature had she left the controls on when she came down?

Rearranging the sheets to encircle them both took quite of bit of effort, and even the fitted sheet was pulled free and tangled up by the time they were done. But they did manage to finally get wrapped up and stable, sitting next to each other with their backs against the wall as the air slowly sucked away the heat of the water droplets still stubbornly clinging to their skin.

“Well,” Natasha huffed. “Guess I’ll think ahead about the room’s temperature next time.”

“Gonna remember towels next time,” Clint muttered, eyes closed as he rested his head on his knees.

“I didn’t forget towels,” she insisted. “I had planned on you lazily air-drying on the bed, and I hadn’t planned on my getting wet at all.”

“You totally forgot the towels,” Clint repeated, mouth obscured by sheets.

“Smartass,” Natasha quipped, pinching the skin on the top of his foot, as it was the only part of him she could reach.

Clint made a sound of protest and tried to shuffle his feet away from her, but she had already let go, soothing the abused skin with her fingers. Then she sighed, and leaned her head back against the wall behind them.

Maybe she’d died.

Maybe this was her heaven.

 

 

But that was bullshit.

There wasn’t a single version of heaven out there that would have her.

 

 

Maybe Clint had died.

Maybe this was his hell.

 

***

She was slightly concerned when they offered her the drug to “assist” the process. They said it would work wonders and reassured her multiple times that it wouldn’t ruin his body.

“Then what about his mind?” she asked, not missing the subtle hint in the phrasing.

“Well, of course it will ruin his mind. Isn’t that what you’re doing to him anyway?”

It wasn’t.

_It wasn’t._

She almost asked him. He was lying on his stomach and she was sitting next to him, casually tracing patterns on his lower back, and she almost asked him.

_Am I ruining your mind?_

She was too afraid of what the answer would be.

***

It hurt her that she couldn’t let it last. A very vocal part of her wanted to continue like they were, and to let Clint actually be the one who finally decided whether or not he would be in pain. Actually leave the decision up to him, as she was working so hard to make him believe it was.

But of course she couldn’t. Because then it would play out just like he had said. They’d laugh and banter and struggle for the power over the conversation, and the moment they were in the fresh air, he’d bolt. Disappear. Vanish.

He had to be broken, and no one was ever broken with a hot shower and a cocoon of stained sheets.

“They’re healing well,” she said, as she finished wrapping his arm again. “I hope I don’t have to make any more of them.”

He flinched at the threat, looking at her with wild eyes as she stood and returned the med kit to the table. He scooted forward on the edge of the bed, as far forward as he could get without standing up. He stayed seated though, because she had told him to sit still.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said. Like he always did.

She wondered how old he had been the first time he’d said it.

“Don’t worry too much,” she soothed him. “I will definitely give you the opportunity to avoid them. If you’re good and do what I want, then you won’t even get one. If you’re good, I won’t hurt you at all.”

He bent over his legs, bringing his chest all the way down to his knees, wrapping his arms around his body in some sort of a protective gesture. Then he suddenly jerked upright, looked like he was going to say something, and then rubbed his face with his hands. After a moment more, he bent over and rested his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, staring down at the floor.

“Well,” she began, and then walked to the back of the room, digging out a large rusty metal tub. It was large enough to hold somewhere between twenty and thirty gallons, and heavy enough that it grated loudly as she dragged it across the floor.

She positioned it under the showerhead, and turned on the water.

It was louder than she’d anticipated.

“Here’s how this will work,” she shouted over the clanging cacophony. “I’m going to tell you to put your head under the water, and then I’m going to start a timer. If you stay under for as long as the timer says, then you get a kiss. If you come up for air before the timer runs out, then you get another scar instead.”

“How long is the timer going to be for?”

“It will be for various times,” she answered, having to shout louder as she returned to the back of the room for the remaining cigarettes and the lighter.

His reaction to the cigarettes was Pavlovian. He stopped leaning forward on the bed and instead scooted almost all the way back. Which might be a problem, if she ever actually managed to get him out into the field. She didn’t want him to have an Achilles’ heal like that. For now, however, it would just speed things up.

“Various times,” he echoed, without seeming to recognize the weight of the words. Then, suddenly, he understood, and he shouted, “We’re going to do this more than once?”

“We’re going to do this six times. Six intervals where you have to try to stay down and then get what you earned.”

The water was taking forever to fill, and she looked calmly into Clint’s eyes, even as his gaze jerked all over the room, automatically searching for a solution. Ultimately, his gaze rested on the tub, slowly filling, and his fear faded away into a grim determination. She could see him deciding to do whatever it took to avoid another scar.

Natasha found that outcome unlikely. Not impossible. But unlikely.

They kept that position while the water filled the rest of the way. Natasha staring at Clint, Clint staring at the water, and the water continuing to fill, implacable to the aura of distress. Then Natasha turned off the water, and Clint still stared, watching the surface of the water begin to slowly settle.

“Go,” Natasha said, breaking the spell, and Clint slowly stood up and slowly walked over to his trial. He took even longer to kneel down than he had to get over there, but Natasha let him gather his courage and do it himself. He had to do all of this by himself. That was the point.

“How long?” he asked, positioning his head over the water, ready to lean down. He was purposefully hyperventilating, raising the oxygen concentration in his blood by the marginal amount that his physiology would let him and stuffing his lungs with it as well. Working to be able to hold on a few more seconds.

He was so thin, compared to how he’d been the first time she’d seen him. She would bet that his lung capacity was probably down too, as was his tolerance for this sort of thing.

“You don’t get to know,” Natasha informed him. The final nail in the coffin.

“I don’t get to know,” he echoed. He didn’t even sound angry. Just despondent. She could hear the _of course I don’t_ unsaid at the end of the sentence.

“You just hold your breath as long as you can and then you come up for air. If you passed the time mark, then you get your kiss. If you haven’t, then…we’ll deal with that if the time comes. But know that if you pass out in the water, then you forfeit the round.”

“Are you going to tap me or something, when I pass the mark?”

“Aren’t you listening to me, Clint? That’s not how this goes. Now, get ready.”

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and opened the number generator she’d prepped. Clint returned to his hyperventilations.

“Go.”

He plunged his head underneath the surface of the water, and she tapped ‘generate.’ The answer was ninety-seven seconds, chosen at random by a computer when given the parameters of one to two hundred seconds. An added cruelty, that his suffering was in the hands of a computer.

Clint exceeded the count by far, staying under an impressive one hundred and seventy-four seconds. Very impressive, given his probable adrenaline levels and his weeks of malnutrition.

“Did I do it?” he gasped. “Did I?”

Natasha hummed in approval and tilted his head back so she could lean down and press her lips to his.

“Very good,” she whispered, and he sagged in relief, leaning against her leg and dripping water all down her pants. Again.

“Now, get ready,” she told him.

“Give me just a moment, please. Just a moment.”

“If you don’t go down when I tell you to go down, then you forfeit the round,” she stated simply, and he scrambled for the edge of the metal tub.

“Go.”

He’d barely had time to breath in before he pushed himself under the water.

Twenty-five seconds this time. Which was lucky, because the lack of preparation, as well as prior exhaustion, had taken their toll, and Clint surfaced suddenly at just past forty seconds.

“I’m sorry,” he babbled, spitting out water. “I’m sorry, please!”

“Shhh,” Natasha said, again drawing his head back. She kissed him gently and whispered, “You did just fine. Two down, four to go.”

He wasn’t wasting time on this break, already breathing heavily in and out and in and out. Or maybe he just needed to breathe that quickly. She gave him a couple seconds, keeping his head tilted back to look at her, and then let go.

“Get ready.”

He moved more slowly – although still efficiently – probably trying to save his oxygen.

“Go.”

One hundred and ninety-three seconds.

Well, shit. There wasn’t a chance in hell on that one. He hadn’t even managed that one the first time.

She pursed her lips and sighed. It would have been nice, but it had been awfully unlikely.

Clint came up with a sputtering cough at ninety-two seconds, which was just a painful waste of effort. He spit out water and was unintelligible the first few times he tried to speak, although Natasha could already guess what he was trying to ask.

“Sorry, love,” she sighed. “Not even close.”

He jerked away from her attempt at comfort, and his eyes shot to the door.

“Clint, I swear to god, if you make a break for that door, I will lose my shit. And then I will not be responsible for what follows, do you understand?”

Clint threw his head back in frustration, still breathing heavily.

“It’s not fair,” he told the ceiling. “It’s not fucking fair.”

“It’s nothing but fair,” she told him, taking his hand and pulling it into her lap. “The numbers are being decided on by a computer. I couldn’t make it unfair even if I tried.”

“You say shit like that all the time,” Clint said, still talking up at the ceiling while Natasha dried an area of skin on his forearm. “But I don’t think it means what all the words mean.”

“Oh?”

She struck the lighter, and lit the cigarette.

“Yeah. I think you’re saying things that don’t mean what you’re saying at all. Like, the fact that it’s a computer doesn’t make it fucking fair. It just makes it…it just…I…”

His words lost their coherency completely as she held the heat just above his skin.

“Finish your thought, pet,” she said softly.

“I don’t remember my thought,” Clint snapped. “I probably never had a full thought to begin with.”

She burned him, much quicker than the others had been. She didn’t wait for the skin to begin to sear and melt; just waited enough for the pain and the blistering. It meant the wound would be less serious, and that she could get her hand away before the pain and adrenaline allowed Clint to rip his hand free.

“At least you got some time to breath,” Natasha said.

Clint had bent over to place his forehead on the floor, burned arm outstretched to his side, panting heavily.

“Get ready.”

“Fuck.”

“Go.”

It was honestly a little impressive how quickly his got his head off the floor and into the tub. She decided to count it, since his heart had been in the right place and since it hadn’t been more than a single second late.

Besides, the generator had given her eleven seconds, and she could only stomach so much…

cruelty?

She turned the word over in her mind while Clint drowned himself.

He surfaced at an unknown time – since Natasha had stopped the count the moment he made eleven seconds – and coughed roughly several times. He couldn’t seem to get his breath back, or perhaps he had breathed in enough water that he was having trouble getting it out.

Either way, she let him be until he stopped coughing, and then she wrapped her fingers in his hair to pull him back for a kiss, even though he hadn’t asked about the numbers. He met the kiss greedily, gratefully, his enthusiasm brought out by relief at the verdict but nonetheless welcomed and unexpectedly pleasant.

“Two more,” she reminded him, gently extracting her lips from his. “Get ready.”

Rejuvenated by his success he poised above the water.

“Go.”

One hundred and forty-two seconds.

That one might be a toss up. He’d made it past that on at least one, maybe two, occasions, but those had both been at the starts of runs. She doubted he’d make it that far again, but still had just enough hope in her to keep the count.

Clint rose at one hundred and five.

“Oh, pet,” she said sadly, once he’d stopped coughing.

She took his hand gently, only to have him rip it back violently.

She slapped him, hard. Harder than she’d slapped him yet, and retook the hand. His mouth worked frantically as she positioned him where she wanted him, until he eventually blurted out, “Can we do it somewhere else? Please? Like, my back maybe, or something?”

He trailed off while she looked back at him, her face showing no emotion.

“No,” she said calmly, and burned him again.

She moved just as quickly, but still almost ended up dragging the cigarette across his skin. He’d moved so quickly at the first touch of pain, that she almost hadn’t been ready. And then he was down again, in the same position as before. Forehead pressed to the floor and arm outstretched beside him. Two red side-by-side dots peering out.

These would hurt for longer than the others had. The first round had been third degree burns, taking out the nerves right along with the skin. These weren’t that deep, and would burn and throb and sting for so much longer.

“One more,” she said. “Get ready.”

He whispered something underneath his breath, too lower for her to catch, and it might have been cursing her and it might have been a prayer but either way, he reached his uninjured arm up and took hold of the edge, pulling himself up to lean over the water.

“Go.”

Ninety-three seconds.

Just maybe.

This world didn’t owe her anything, but it probably had a massive debt piling up for Clint Barton. Maybe it would cash in now.

_This is your own game. You’re the one who did this. Why are you appealing to the world?_

Clint broke the water at ninety-eight seconds and Natasha was peppering his face with kisses even before he stopped coughing.

“Good boy,” she praised, light with legitimate joy and with laughter on her lips. Her smile was infectious, as was the good news, and Clint kissed back at her, even though they were missing each other’s mouths far more often than they were meeting.

“Let’s get you up on the bed, hmmm?”

This time she wrapped him up in the sheets and then wrapped herself around him. She sat on his left side, so he could hang his right arm out in the air to cool and to begin to heal.

There was just one more thing.

She pulled her tablet over from where she’d left it on the foot of the bed, and placed it between Clint’s cocooned feet. She turned it on, unlocked it, and began to play the video that was ready.

Clint watched, unable to draw his eyes away, as a body-double of himself was tried and executed, according to the perceived justice of the organization. The young man they’d used had actually been executed, so any attempts to search for doctoring would come up negative. The only question was whether or not everyone would believe that the grainy face in the video belonged to Clint Barton.

Clint, exhausted and isolated as he would, didn’t doubt it for a second.

“This went out to SHIELD forty-eight hours ago,” Natasha informed him. “The only search team looking for you was recalled eleven hours ago. Your file was changed to list you as ‘deceased’ four hours ago.”

He made a small noise, reaching out with his burned arm to touch the screen in front of him, as though to rewind and take it all back.

“So, Clint,” she whispered in his ear. “How does it feel to be free of them completely? You’re just mine now. Just mine.”

He turned and buried his face in her shoulder, scrabbling to clutch the fabric of her shirt in his weak and shaking fingers. He pushed his whole body as close to her as he could get, moving himself into her lap.

And then he just cried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Optional title for this chapter is: Awwww, that's so cute. Really, it's just adora---NATASHA WHAT THE FUCK?
> 
> Next chapter most likely to be Monday.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to point out that tornadoes came through the area and killed the power, so it is not TECHNICALLY my fault that I'm a few hours short of the "Monday" deadline.

The next several weeks were lazy and pleasant. Like lying out by a pool when you’re the only one there and it’s all still water and warm sun. She quickly discovered many more amusing ways to torture him, all without inflicting pain.

For example, he couldn’t stand not quite being touched. She discovered it while they were lying on his bed, with Natasha curled up into his chest so they could both fit lengthwise. She was tracing patterns on his chest with her fingers while he tracked the movement with his eyes.

She lifted her fingers slightly, no longer actually touching his skin but instead brushing the hairs of his chest ever so slightly. She had to actually concentrate for a moment, trying to keep from accidentally touching the surface of his skin.

Then suddenly, he shifted his weight and arched his body up to force contact between them, closing the millimeter gap between their skin.

She continued tracing the patterns she had been before, wondering whether the moment had been a coincidence or if it had been purposeful. She waited a moment, and then tried again - brushing the hairs instead of brushing the skin. After not more than a few seconds, he arched again, forcing the contact. Natasha sat up, intrigued by the motion, and ready to discover its reason.

"Hold still," she ordered, narrowing her eyes at him, telling him _I know what you're doing_.

She straddled him roughly, pinning him underneath her, and poised her hand just above his chest, letting her fingers curl lightly, and again began brushing the hair without touching his skin.

He lasted a grand total of eleven seconds before he began breathing more heavily, and a grand total of forty-six before he made a little whining noise.

“You are fucking sensitive,” she mocked him, finally obliging and letting her fingertips touch him.

“You’re cheating,” he panted. “It’s not fair, playing like that. Like tickling or…or like…I don’t know, like _something_.”

“Like edging?” she asked, and the smirk on her face grew wider when he stilled suddenly beneath her.

“Um,” he said, then drew a long deep breath. “I don’t…not…I’m…”

Natasha interrupted him before he could do or say anything that would get him into trouble. She was feeling mischievous, but lighthearted. So she bent over and laid a quick kiss to his stomach, but then climbed off him.

“I’m just teasing, Clint. Although I’d love to get you blindfolded in a chair and play ‘where am I touching you?’ one day.”

“Don’t handle blindfolds well,” he reminded her, relaxing at the deviation away from the unexplored territory between them.

“You’d handle it terribly,” she assured him. “You’d be a writhing mess from the moment I started to the moment I finished. And I’m sure you’d look fucking beautiful, too.”

Clint didn’t say anything for a long time after that, and Natasha wasn’t in any hurry to shatter the peace.

***

It turned out to be one of many ways to make Clint writhe. He had an intense sensitivity to most forms of touch, and she quickly turned it into a game.

“Natasha,” he protested, a petulant whine in his voice. He curled away from the small container she’d placed on the bed, pressing himself up against the wall. “Why are you trying to kill me? Do you want me to die? Is that was this is? Slow torturous death? Just cut the crap and end me already.”

“You are such an over-dramatic child,” Natasha mocked him, leaning down to nip his shoulder. “Now flip over onto your stomach and rest your face in your hands.” When he hesitated she added, “Don’t make me blindfold you.”

Her stomach dropped when, for a moment, it looked like he might not comply and would force her to follow through on the threat. He’d turned out to be right about the blindfold. Most games didn’t turn out to be very fun when he was wearing it. He wouldn’t calm down, no matter the time or effort she put into it.

She was determined to break that, eventually, but it would probably require a lot more pushing than she was willing to do today. She hadn’t really hurt him in forever, maybe a whole month at this point. Not since the self-drowning incident.

But then he was moving, wordless noises of protests on lips, making sounds like a old dog that just wanted to lie in the sun. She let herself relax again, slowly touching his back gently in praise. She kneaded at his waning muscles, which had once been all hard lines and were now fading underneath his skin.

She knew he did what he could when he was stuck in the little room without her, but he wasn’t getting the nutrition he needed, and there was only so much you could do in a tiny concrete box, even if you haven’t been ripped open in a month.

She dug deeper with her fingers, pushing at the stressed muscles and rubbing circles with the press of her thumbs. She dug deep into just the right side of painful, soothing him with the hot friction of her palms when he made the tiniest little noise of distress. She worked until all the tension drained out of his body, and she felt him settle minutely underneath her.

Then she fished one of the pieces of ice out the bowl next to her. She knew he heard the movement – she hadn’t been trying to hide it – and she smiled in amusement at how quickly he tensed up again underneath her. Although he couldn’t quite reach the same level of concrete strain that he’d started with.

“Someday,” Natasha whispered to him, “you will learn to just relax and trust me.”

She pressed the ice cube to the back of his neck, mindful of the contrast between the damp sweat at his hairline and the immediate dripping melting ice. The water curved in little rivulets, already eager to wrap his neck and dampen the sheets. So she moved slowly down his spine, holding the cube in place with one finger, and forcing herself into the head space of waiting for a target.

Slowly. Patiently. Not the slightest alteration in the torturous progression or to the pressure with which she pressed the freezing chill into Clint’s skin. He was twisting underneath her before she passed his shoulder blades.

“It’s taking forever,” he complained. “Nat, you’re taking _forever_!”

It knocked the air out of her, and the pressure of the ice cube changed ever so slightly for the briefest moment when her fingers twitched. She could only hope that he was numb enough to have been unable to notice her physical reaction to the nickname.

She tried it out in her mind. The single syllable said so much and nothing at all at the same time. Was it a loss of respect or a growing familiarization? Was it a short word to better snap at her in anger or to more quickly say her name? A sign of mutiny or a rough desire to have her entire attention on him as quickly as possible?

Or was that just Clint? Quick to anger and quick to forgiveness, already forgetting how she’d made him scream.

The world of spies was treacherous. You did horrible things because that was what you were made to do. Taking things personally was just stupid. You’d get yourself and everyone around you killed in a mad-dash for vengeance for an act the perpetrator probably didn’t even remember.

She had a sudden vision of another universe. Another dimension. The two of them lying on a park bench with easy nonverbal communication passing between them at the slightest shift in position or change in tension.

_sorry i shot you  
_

_can you                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   forgive me_

_no you're not_

Easy warmth and absent viciousness.

She continued the slow slide of the ice, forcing the syllable away from her mind to be examined again never. Refocusing her attention at the matter at hand. She would not do this halfway. She would not lose this when it was beneath her fingers. Beneath her body. She would not play a soft hand when it was the rending biting hand that would get her what she wanted. She never got what she wanted, but she would this time.

_You cannot torture someone into loving you._

_Watch me._

Clint arched against her, unmindful of the new grim set of her mouth as she reached the curve in the small of his back, dipping down with the ridges of his spine. The water was dripping faster and the ice cube was smaller now. She couldn’t feel the tip of her finger anymore, although she could see the indentation it had melted into the flat top of the ice.

Down, down, down, until she had to resettled herself over Clint’s thighs to reach the curve of his ass. The ice cube wasn’t much bigger than her finger tip when she reached the end of his spine, continuing to push the ice farther, sliding it between his cheeks and down to his hole.

His squeak of protest turned into a soft gasp when she used her other hand to hold him open and exposed so she could uncompromisingly push the last bit of ice into his body, past the soft clenching ring of muscles, to melt inside with his body heat.

“God, Nat!” he whimpered into his pillow, shifting his hips and – if she wasn’t mistaken – trying to abort a reflexive thrust into the mattress.

She bent over and kissed the small hole where the ice had disappeared. There was cold water pooling and leaking and she licked it and then followed through on the motion, pushing her tongue in to follow the ice. She could just feel it, with the tip of her tongue, melting completely just as she touched it.

She pulled out, but didn’t stop the long lick of her tongue as she dragged it up his body, following his spine in the opposite direction that the ice had, tasting the lines of cold water as she moved up his body until she reached the nape of his neck. She bit him hard, with a growl of possessive anger.

“Mine,” she hissed around the mouthful of him.

Clint made a few inarticulate noises that suddenly found words with the exclamation, “Aw, _fuck_.”

Natasha laughed against his skin.

“Maybe one day,” she said, releasing him and sitting up. “But right now, we’ve got a bunch of ice cubes left. I wonder if I can think of anything fun to do with those.”

***

She had him kneeling in front of her while she sat with crossed legs on the bed. She had cheese and crackers lined up on her thighs. A series of crackers lined up on her left one and a series of cheese cubes lined up on her right.

She was asking him questions, all about him, and idly rewarding him as he talked to her.

“Favorite childhood hiding place,” she queried.

“Big tree,” Clint shot back quickly, mouth still half-full of the last cracker, and it was oddly charming rather than gross.

“Any one in particular?”

“There was a big oak about thirty feet from the house. I liked to climb it in the dark, on the days that I wasn’t allowed back inside. Dad cut all the lower branches off when he found out, but it didn’t stop me.”

“As though you’d be stopped by something like that,” she laughed, combining a cheese and a cracker and bringing them to his mouth. He opened obligingly for her to pop it in, hands resting on his thighs like he’d been told. He hadn’t moved in nearly twenty minutes, and he didn’t show any signs of discomfort. Still, she should probably give him a break in a moment. No sense in being dangerous.

“Anyone ever join you up there?”

A slight pause, not even a heartbeat long, and then, “No. I kept it to myself. Gotta have something that’s just yours when you’re a kid. And if no one gives you anything, then you gotta take it.”

That had been a lie. It had been expertly covered by a series of details, attempting to distract or cover the slip, but that had definitely been a lie. She’d known it was going to happen eventually, but she hadn’t been expecting it right this very second.

She wiped the grease and crumbs from her fingers off on her pants and reached out to place two fingers under his chin. She tilted his face up to look at her, snapping her fingers in his face when he tried to keep his eyes downcast.

That was guilt. So at least he knew what he’d done.

“You want to tell me what just happened?” she said coldly.

He twisted his head suddenly, burying his face in the hand that had been holding his chin.

“M’sorry,” he mumbled into her palm.

“Tell me what you did,” she pressed.

“I disobeyed,” he answer, no hesitation in the degrading word choice.

_Told you I’d condition you against that._

“By doing what?”

“I lied. Fuck, I lied, I’m sorry. It wasn’t even…it wasn’t even…it’s not a thing! I can tell you. It’s _fine_ to tell you. Not even a secret.”

“And you will tell me. In a few minutes, I’m going to bring you back over here and put you back in this spot. Then I’m going to ask the question again, and you’re going to answer it truthfully. Now, how about you tell me what’s going to happen between then and now?”

“You’re going to punish me.”

The weight of his head against her hand had pushed it down and forward so it was resting on her knee, pinned between her body and the press of Clint’s head.

“Yes, I am,” she agreed. “Stand up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it's that time again. I will be disappearing until Saturday because I've got my next neuro exam on Friday, and it's going to be rough. As usual, I'll try and get you a longer chapter that weekend, to make up for the long stretch of time and for the fact that this one was a little shorter.


	8. Chapter 8

She almost didn’t tie him down, but it was a passing fancy, brought on by the fact that he willingly crossed over the red line. He stood there, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot and waiting for the next set of instructions. However, she let the impulse remain a passing fancy, and secured him, bent over, to the platform.

It was a little too low, forcing him to choose between letting his knees bend or stretching down too far for comfort. But then, the whole contraption wasn’t built with comfort in mind. It was sturdy enough to take his entire weight, either way, so the choice was up to him.

He was twisting his wrists reflexively, from where he was positioned. The leather ties that held them down weren’t wide and soft as they had been in the past. These were thinner and, subsequently, more coarse. If he pulled against them too hard, they would bite and draw blood. A fact of which she gently warned him.

He responded, of course, by testing them, pulling and twisting in exactly the way she’d been hoping to encourage him to avoid. Which shouldn’t have really surprised her, so she pushed the flare of irritation down into complacency. She hadn’t told him _not_ to move, just that it would hurt. Deal with one issue at a time.

Once he was completely bound down, Natasha left for a few moments. She’d envisioned something a little different for retaliation against the lie, whenever it had come. The equipment she needed was more complicated – a little more expensive – and not something she could just keep in the back of the room.

When she returned, drawing the machine behind her, she rolled her eyes at the reddening skin beneath Clint’s bonds.

“Really, pet?” she sighed. “That was quick, and it’s only going to get worse. Why do you keep doing this to yourself?”

“You’re the one who tied me up,” Clint mumbled at the floor.

“And you’re then one who earned it. And you’re the one making it worse, all the time. God damn it, I’m so frustrated with you right now.”

Clint shifted in his position while Natasha watched him as he tried to find a balance in the whole situation. Which was amusing, even in the midst of her personal frustrations, because there was no balance here. Not physically, when the entire situation had been designed against it, and not emotionally, when no one present was capable of that at all. She sighed and placed the electrodes on either side of the back of his neck.

“These,” she explained. “Are very specific. In fact, I don’t really have the slightest idea how or why they work, even though I’ve gotten very technical explanations from the inventors three separate times. All without my asking. Their general function, however, I understand perfectly. Somewhere back _here_ ,” she squeezed his neck sharply, down at the base of his skull, “is the part of the brain that tells us to breath. Actually there are apparently two parts, but this machine only affects one. The apneumo-something. I don’t know. The point is that when I turn this machine on, you will still be capable of breathing, but your body will suddenly forgot to tell you that it needs to be done.”

Clint didn’t say anything, lying very still while he tried to figure out what that meant for him.

“Sorry,” she laughed. “Maybe I should explain more. When I hit this switch, your body won’t breath on it’s own. Like how, when you sleep or don’t pay attention, you’re body breathes for you. You don’t think about it. Well, this is going to stop that completely. If you want to breath, you’re going to have to do it manually. You won’t even know that you’re running out of oxygen, so I’d be sure to focus if I were you.”

“Wait, N—ma’am. That sounds really dangerous what if--”

“No,” she cut him off. “Do you know what was really dangerous? Fucking lying to me. Bite your lip and endure the retribution.”

She flicked the switch, watching his whole body stiffen, and smirked in accomplishment as she attached the O2 stat measurement to his toe. He was right after all. This was probably more dangerous than the self-drowning. She wasn’t going to cut corners.

She watched the screen for a moment, making sure that the machine wasn’t doing more than it was supposed to, and was gratified when the state hung at 100%. Technically then, he was hyperventilating, trying to make up for the automatic response. Healthy people usually hung at 98%.

“Let’s begin,” she said, picking up the cane she’d chosen. “Tell me why we’re here.”

“I lied,” Clint said, and Natasha placed one hand on his back in slight warning, before she laid the first set of six stripes.

The first one made him flinch and quietly mutter “shit” under his breath, but she didn’t give him much time to recover before she followed it up with the second one, right on top. The skin broke, unable to hold up to the second strike, and Clint held his breath to fight against the pain. Which sent him into a tailspin of non-breathing.

She didn’t give him a break to try and remember how it worked again. She put another four stripes across his ass, and she guessed he was probably staying silent only because there was nothing left in his lungs.

She’d tried to keep the set of six together as much as possible, grouped at the top of the curve of his ass. Then after six, she stopped. Keeping her hand where it was resting on the small of his back, she said again, “Why are we here?”

There was a slight hesitation, Clint trying to figure out if she wanted something other than what he was giving her, but he then repeated, “I lied.”

She repeated the six cuts. This time allowing them to spread out a little more, but still keeping them in one area, this time just at the top of his thighs. He did more than cry out at those, tightening his legs and trying to shift his feet, straining at the ties holding him still. She continued, regardless of his fidgeting, until she’d completed the set.

Then, “Why are we here?”

Or, at least, that’s what she tried to say. She was interrupted halfway through by a low whining noise from Clint, who had either realized he’d stopped breathing or had realized the way this game was going to go.

He had to have known she’d keep him engaged, right? The inhibited breathing alone should have told him that, if their history didn’t. He had no business being surprised by any of it.

She stopped mid-sentence at his noise and put her full strength into two cuts in the middle of his thigh. They bit deep, blood quickly dripping down his legs, and the scream was long enough to remind him that he wasn’t breathing, when he ran completely out of air even though his body couldn’t figure out why.

“Why are we here?” she asked.

“I lied,” Clint managed, having to make several attempts at a breath before he got enough air in his lungs to manage the required noises.

She took her hand off his back for the next six. He’d gotten more than enough warning, probably more than he deserved, and the comforting touch was not the aura she was going for. Then she laid the next six, halving the distance between the first two sets, except for the last stroke. For the last one, she cut diagonally, with the tip down on his far thigh.

He’d run out of air again, and she glanced at the O2 stats, which were hovering dangerously in the low 80s. So she took a break, letting him remember – by muscle memory if nothing else – what it meant for his body to breath. She thought he was going to pass out, for a moment, because he looked to be using the break to acclimatize to the pain, forgetting his need for oxygen.

 _Come on, Clint,_ she chided him mentally. If he did pass out then he really would suffocate, unable to consciously tell his body to breath. She’d have to intubate him or something. Care for him. And that was not how a punishment was supposed to go.

Thankfully, he suddenly took a deep rasping breath, forcing it out again just as quickly, quickly repeating the action. In and out and in again.

“Seeing spots,” he gasped at one point.

“Why are we here?” she responded.

They continued like that, holding a thin line between them. Clint walked the precipice of unknowing asphyxiation while Natasha tried to guide him without letting him know he was being guided. She didn’t touch him with her hands again, and she didn’t say anything other than “why are we here?” but she paused at opportune moments, depending on the O2 stats.

“Please!” Clint eventually cried out. “I got it, I swear I got it, and I’m already sorry. God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to lie to you. It just slipped out. It wasn’t premediated or anything.”

“Why are we here?”

“Fuck. _Fuck,_ I…what do you want from me? Am I doing this wrong? Is there something else you want from me?”

Natasha repeated the double cut to his mid-thighs that she’d done the last time he’d broken the pattern, and he screamed, loud and feral. It started out like a battle cry, but faded away into a meaningless noise as he thrashed all the harder in his bonds. Having some kind of mental break, too frustrated with the world to use words.

“Why are we here?”

“Because I am a goddamn idiot who can’t figure out what’s truth and what’s not, even when it bites him in the ass.”

Another two cuts. Although when he was talking so much it was easier for him to remember to breath. His stats had bounced back up to the 90s. He’d probably still be feeling it, but it wasn’t even really a danger zone.

“I lied,” Clint screamed. “I lied, I lied, I lied! I ruined it and lied, fuck, I’m sorry.”

“Why are we here?” Natasha asked calmly.

“I lied.”

Another set of six. It was difficult to tell where she had or had not hit, given the amount of blood and bruising, but she supposed it didn’t really matter. She could probably brush his ass with her fingers and he’d scream at this point.

Also, she was getting bored. The repetition was probably working wonders on Clint’s psyche, but it wasn’t doing her any favors either. There was only so much you could do with a cane if you didn’t want to do permanent damage.

Well, permanent _physical_ damage.

She watched Clint force himself to breath in and out slowly, counting in his head. Probably some kind of four-four pattern, which would also help him calm down. He started making a thin whining noise on every exhalation, using the pattern of its presence and not-presence to cue his brain in to what was happening with his body.

That was actually really smart. If your lungs won’t tell you if you’re breathing, use your ears. It was also a good clue that they were done with the machine, and she turned it off with a flick of the switch.

It’d take him a few more minutes for his brain to get itself in working order, so she watched him calmly. Neither of them said anything, Natasha keeping her silence on purpose and Clint probably frightened at any upcoming potential for pain.

She could see the moment he remembered how breathing worked again, because he suddenly took such a deep breath he sounded like he’d been half-dead, even though his stats had been around 90 the whole time.

She unbuckled him while he got his breath back, but he didn’t stand when free, continuing to just lie there.

“Get up,” she ordered, slapping his ass and wincing when blood splattered onto her shirt. She’d have to wash it tonight, now.

It was worth the pitiable half-strangled cry she got out of him for it though, and then he struggled to his feet carefully, leaving the action of unbending his waist for the last possible moment.

“I’m sorry,” he said carefully, glancing up to look her in the eye, even though he kept his face down. There was snot and tears all over his face, and he’d bit his own lip at some point.

“You say that like you think we’re done,” she chided, and he closed his eyes. The look was mostly resignation, if also a little despair, and she rewarded the lack of anger by reaching out and dabbing touching her finger to the drop of blood welling on his lip, wiping it away slowly.

“Go to the wall,” she ordered. “I’ve punished you for lying in this room. Now we’re going to talk about lying to _me_.”

“And by talk you mean beat the shit out of me,” he commented, though he did go and stand with his face to the wall, correctly predicting that she wanted him between the rings on the floor and wall.

“Glad you have such an astute grasp of the situation,” she replied dryly, coming to stand behind him. “Now, you get to make a choice.”

“Oh, fan-fucking-tastic. I’m sure I’ll _love_ both options.”

He was standing a little bit away from the wall itself, sticking his rear end out like a punished toddler who didn’t know what to do about the pain.

“You can either be tied here or stay here of your own accord,” Natasha offered.

“There’s no way in hell I can stay here of my own accord. I couldn’t take six with your fucking cane. I remember what you can do with a whip. I’ll take the lacerations to my wrists over the consequences of moving, thank you very much.”

“I’ll half the number of strokes,” she offered, amused at the set of his shoulders as he braced himself for what was to come.

That gave him pause, and he clenched his jaw, muttering, “Of course you fucking would,” to himself, before he finally shook his head again.

“Still no?” she confirmed.

“Half the strokes doesn’t matter if you keep earning more. And the only angles I can think of here are that you’re planning on a small number, in which case I’ll just take it, or you’re planning on a large number, and it won’t matter anyway.”

“Thinking this through a lot, aren’t we?” Natasha said, bending down to tie his ankles to the rings in the floor. He’d hurt them pretty badly, fighting the hold during the caning, but it wasn’t really anything in comparison to his ass.

“I try,” Clint responded, and she decided not to blame him for the bitterness in his voice.

By the time she’d finished the set up and was standing behind him again, he was already clenching and unclenching his hands. It made her want to take and sooth them, but she figured it would be a useless counterproductive measure in the moment.

So she struck.

Clint did a better job with the first stroke than he had the first time they’d done this. He forced relaxation into his stiff muscles, using the tension in his legs to allow the rest of his body to keep pliant. Which would have been great if Natasha hadn’t already thrashed him there.

As it was, he lasted a couple of strokes, none of them deep enough to break skin, before he began to sag, moving some of the strain from his ruined legs and ass onto his arms and back. That was when she upped her velocity, swinging the next stroke harsh and wild, adding to the growing pain.

“Fuck!” Clint screamed. “You did that on purpose. You waited for me to tense up?”

“You’re surprised?” Natasha asked. She cracked down another stroke. “Angry?” Another stroke. “Betrayed? I’m not sure why you seem unsettled by the idea that I’m setting out to hurt you here.”

He kept his silence then, and she let him, staying the whip for a moment to let him think about it.

“I said I’m sorry,” he said quietly, and Natasha smiled in fondness at the child-like view of life.

“Sorry doesn’t make it better,” she reminded him.

“Neither does taking it out on my ass,” he snapped back.

She answered with a series of harsh strokes that forced him back into silence as he struggled to establish a breathing pattern.

“You can’t be very sorry if you’re still snapping at me,” she added, over the sound of the whip.

“I am sorry! I’m _actually_ sorry. I’m not ‘I don’t want to get punished any more’ sorry, I’m actually fucking sorry. It was a stupid-ass move.”

“It was the most important rule.”

“God I fucking know. I wasn’t – _fuck_ – I wasn’t trying to lie, it’s just a habit. You can’t be mad at me because of a habit when – _fuck!_ – goddammit stop that while I’m trying to talk to you!”

She punished that. Not just a couple harsher strikes, but a long drawn out session without breaks and every cut drawing blood. She even let some of them stray from his back down to his ass. His throat was going to be as raw as the rest of him for days.

When he tried to sink down on his knees, stopped only because the loops around his wrists wouldn’t let him sink low enough, she stopped. She watched him hang there for a moment, and realized he was softly hitting his forehead against the wall in front of him. Repetition of a pain he probably couldn’t even feel.

“When we’re over there,” she reminded him, “then talking to me is a right. You can always speak or ask to speak to me when we’re on the other side of the line. But when we’re over here, talking to me is a privilege. If you seek to abuse it, I will take it away until such time as I think you understand how this works.”

“Please,” Clint whimpered. “Please still talk to me. I’ll be good. It’s worse when you don’t talk. I’m sorry, I just got frustrated. Won’t let it happen again. I won’t.”

“I believe you,” Natasha said, and Clint shuddered in visible relief. “Now, let’s finish this up, don’t you think?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

It didn’t take much. His mind had decided that he was done, so the whip itself didn’t matter as much. She stopped long before the point she’d brought him to the last time he’d been under her whip, and she knew he couldn’t tell the difference at all.

“All right, love,” she said, coiling the whip in her hand. “I’m going to unhook you know, and you’re going to have to stand up, because you have to earn your right back to the other side of the room.”

He scrabbled at the floor with his feet and slurred something that Natasha determined to be, “What do I have to do?” even though it came out more, “wdo I fta do?”

“Walk the perimeter of the room,” she answered.

He didn’t seem to question the pointlessness of the order, just nodded his head as violently as he was able, as Natasha unhooked him. She had to help him steady up to his feet, but he was actually able to stand on his own, and she stepped away from him.

“Go on,” she reminded him, since he’d seemed to have forgotten what he was doing.

He took a few steps forward, and then had to put his hand out on the wall to catch himself before he fell. The look of fear and confusion on his face when he looked at her, to see if that wasn’t allowed, made her want to scoop him up and take him to the bed immediately. But she’d said to walk, so he was going to walk. She didn’t let the slightest emotion show on her face, watching with an imitation of unperturbed third party interest.

He went back to walking.

The entire process was slow and painful for everyone involved. The worst part was when Clint reached the red line, because he didn’t seem to be able to decide whether or not to cross it, not knowing if “perimeter of the room” kept the red line as the edge of his world.

She decided, before he did, that she’d take either one. If he crossed the line, he’d end up having to walk twice as far, and if he didn’t he’d have to walk across open space.

He chose to keep on this side of the line, abandoning the wall and forging out across open air. He almost didn’t make it, falling down to one knee at one point, and the jarring pain elicited by the press and stretch of his wounded skin almost took him the rest of the way to the floor.

But then he looked up at where she was standing, still watching him.

“I can do this,” he told her, or maybe told himself. “I am going to do this, watch. Watch me, I can do it.”

She didn’t even know if his mind was in the same room as their bodies were.

When he made it back to the rings she moved like lightening, striking out to cross the space between them more quickly than Clint was able to register her movement.

“Come on, baby,” she muttered, hooking one of his arms over her shoulder and half-carrying him toward the bed.

“Nooo,” he whined. “Shit, no.”

“It’s all right,” she placated. “It’s over.”

“No, it’s not,” he protested, eyes wild and darting everywhere. “You’re not calling me Clint. You call me pet names when I’m in trouble. You didn’t call me Clint.”

She hadn’t realized he’d picked up on that.

“It’s all right, Clint,” she said. “It’s over. It’s time to lie down.”

He finally seemed to believe her, letting himself cross the line to the other side of the room, and he wasn’t the only one who breathed easier when they made the bed. She arranged him face down, and he shuddered and lay still.

“You can’t sleep yet, Clint,” she reminded him. “You owe me the truth. Ready? Did anyone ever climb up and hide with you in the tree?”

“Mom,” Clint answered promptly, even if it was into his pillow.

“Your mother?” Natasha confirmed. “Ok then, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Stupid.”

“Not good enough, Clint. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. I think it was because I wanted to make sure you knew I hated her. I fucking hated everyone. Didn’t want you thinking maybe I didn’t after all.”

“Then why was she in the tree?”

“One day, she ran out of the house so fast and I just knew she needed me, so I climbed down and helped her up, and then I joined her. We stayed up there all night, talking and looking at the stars. And I thought maybe that would be enough. That she’d see what it was like to be happy and safe for a few minutes, and she’d finally leave him.”

“But?”

“But the next morning everything was the same. Guess I couldn’t make her feel safe after all.”

Natasha thought about that one for a long time, sitting beside his bed and watching him drift into sleep. By the time she finally got up to find the first aid supplies, Clint was sleeping so deeply that he didn’t do anything more than let his eyes flutter open and then closed again when she started applying it.

***

She was back on duty. Her imposed sentence of non-activity had come to an abrupt end with the arrival of a job that only she could do. She was leaving in four hours, and she wouldn’t be back for over three days.

She’d known, on a conscious level, that the moment would come, and she supposed she could only be grateful that the first mission was short enough that she could just leave him in his room without having to recruit anyone to look in on him. She didn’t want anyone else involved. Not when the timing and the slightest change in phrasing could be so important.

The night before, she brought Clint a real meal. As in, actual porcelain plate with actual silverware. She’d used her new freedom to make the over-an-hour drive into the city in order to get real restaurant food for him, rather than the some cafeteria attempts as always.

She didn’t tell him anything was about to change, but he seemed to realize when he saw the pirozhki, carefully covered in plastic wrap.

“That’s real food,” he exclaimed. “I mean, it’s no pizza, but that’s definitely real food.”

She handed it to him with a word, and then sat down on the bed next to him. It had been a few days since their post-lying session, but he was still spending most of his time on his stomach.

Which still sounded like the beginning of a dirty joke, even when she hadn’t said it out loud.

She laughed softly, smiling and shaking her head in dismissal when he glanced up to see what it had been about. Instead she just leaned back against the wall, drawing him with her so he could lean back against her while he ate. He winced at the weight against his skin, but didn’t fight her. In fact, he seemed more interested in the food than anything else.

She kissed the top of his head and thought that, maybe, it hadn’t been as ridiculous of a gesture as she’d been thinking on the way back.

“So,” Clint said, mouth full. “What did I do to earn this? Just so, you know, I can think about doing it again in the future, if I want to.”

Natasha made a non-committal humming noise, but didn’t answer the question. Clint let it drop quickly, not about to push his luck.

Poor boy. He probably wasn’t going to handle three days of sudden isolation very well. Especially since she had no intention of warning him about it at all.


	9. Chapter 9

She was tired. The kind of tired that makes you blink slowly and wish you were dead. The kind that you can only fight through the with routine of years and years of muscle memory. The kind that leaves you leaning against the wall for the split-seconds that no one else is in the hallway, because every single second of rest you can get is utterly desperate.

The mission had been a success, thanks entirely to her adrenaline-driven strung-out panic and hypervigilance. There was still blood on her hands, in the most literal sense of the words, when she finished her debriefing. Which she could only assume had also gone well, since she didn’t remember any of it.

She fell asleep on her floor, already closing her eyes when the latch snicked shut as the door swung closed with gravity. Her last thought was a trial of running numbers, counting upwards, without pausing or slowing. Somehow, even as she drifted away, they worried her. The ever-rising number leaked into her dreams, morphing them into strange nightmares without tangible danger.

She awoke with a start, considered the fact that she was lying on her floor, and rolled her eyes. It might come back to bite her, too, considering there was always some asshole with an eager-to-please attitude and too much time on their hands, looking to report shit to the higher-ups. Bedroom cameras were a good place to start with that.

She crawled to her feet with a stifled groan and tried to rub the kink out of her neck, rolling her head back and forth. The walls of the little room were dark gray, although they’d probably look less dark if she turned her lights on to anything other than the lowest setting. Or if she got something to cover her bed that wasn’t also gray. Or if she ever turned her desk light on.

It wasn’t like personalizing your room wasn’t allowed. It just had never seemed necessary. Yet, for the first time, she couldn’t help but peruse her space with the distinct feeling that something was missing. That there was something that –

Shit.

Clint.

She’d forgotten. She’d gotten stuck in the exhausted post-mission routine and lost track of her new priorities. More and more often memories were getting lost in the shuffle, as she tried to keep up with her own chaotic life. Still, Clint Barton shouldn’t have been one of those things. She should never have let herself get that tired.

She tried not to glance at her watch, but the masochist in her couldn’t help it. And the little screen confirmed her fears. She’d been out on the floor for over fourteen hours. Add that to the fact that the mission had taken longer than it should have – she _had_ been thinking about Clint then, tapping her toe against the edge of the wall while the men working with her eyed her impatience with evident discomfort – and it all meant that Clint had been alone in that room for five days.

124 hours.

7444 minutes.

446647 seconds.

446648.

…649.

Tick, tick, tick, even as she threw the door open and marched down the hallway as quickly as she felt safe doing. The surge of adrenaline, scrounged up from her barely recovering body, was enough to make her start shaking, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since just before their extraction plane arrived.

Clint hadn’t eaten in longer.

Thank god there was a constant supply of water to the room. If she hadn’t left him with water then she’d have had to call someone to check up on him when she found out that the mission had gone sideways. And involving someone else in this was something she wanted to put off for as long as possible.

Still. Too much time. It was too much damn time. Heading straight there would have been too much time. Fourteen hours on top of it was just—

Torture.

She stuttered to a stop in front of the door to Clint’s cell.

Wasn’t torture the point? Wasn’t torture the _goddamn_ point? Had she lost that somewhere, within the….within what?

Her hands were still shaking as she slowly unlocked the door and stepped into the airlock portion of the cell. There was still another door between her and Clint, but she was shielded from any potential prying eyes in the hallway. Also, she could look at the screens from the video cameras. Use them to consider her next move. And that move depended on the answer to the question: had she compromised herself?

Clint was lying on the bed, loosely curled into a ball, hand hanging off the edge of the bed. He looked dead, and it was only a repetitive movement of his right hand – too grainy to identify more specifically than that – that calmed her fears on that account.

She bit the inside of her cheek and forced herself to consider the situation. She had known, going in, that she was likely to get attached in some way. If that, however, was altering her approach to the situation, then it was an actual problem.

But then again, she’d lessened her harsh treatment only in proportion with his rising compliance. She turned that fact over in her mind a couple of times, simultaneously forcing herself to consider her hesitation to hurt him. She hadn’t really noticed it when it was happening, but thinking back, she’d definitely wanted the moments to be over.

However, she’d still done it all.

Which ended up being her final conclusion. She hadn’t liked it, but she’d done what she’d needed to, and that was all that had mattered. There were hundreds and thousands of things that she hadn’t wanted to do in her life, and she’d had to do them anyway. She’d manage the same way with this problem. In fact, now that she was aware of the potential danger, she would be less vulnerable to it.

She opened the seal with renewed confidence, stepping into the room with a warm smile to Clint and a resolved set to her shoulders.

Which was good because as soon as Clint heard the door unlock, he threw his head up to look at her coming in, blinked once in a hunger-induced semi-stupor, and launched himself over the head of the bed toward her in a feral attack.

The jump was less impressive than it would have been when he’d first arrived. As it stood now, his left foot didn’t quite clear the metal frame of the headboard, throwing off his trajectory when it caught. As his balanced upset, he readjusted his plan, dropping his shoulder to take the brunt of his impact against the floor, using his momentum to roll to his feet and reach out and claw at her eyes with his right hand, his left hand still balled into a fist.

It was smart of him to use the momentum to get him to his feet. She doubted he would have had the strength get there on his own. She had both his wrists in her grip in a heartbeat, holding him back with the same amount of strength she would have needed to subdue a toddler.

And then his left fist shook free and came flying at her face. Except, he twisted his fingers deftly and suddenly she could see the needle he’d half-hidden clenched in his fist. She hadn’t been ready for it, and her hand was in the wrong place. She had to choose between taking the needle in her arm or taking it in her face, and arms didn’t have eyes or wear pretty lipstick to make men follow her into dark alleys.

As soon as the needle buried itself in her arm, she felt him freeze. His whole body had already been vibrating with tension, but now it shook like a small full-body seizure. It was probably impressive that he was still standing. She didn’t have the slightest clue where he’d found the resolve to actually get lose from her grip.

He stared at the needle, and the slow blood drop welling up around it, and squinted his eyes and cocked his head, like he was trying to solve a puzzle laid out in front of him.

“See what you did?” Natasha asked with a bite of anger in her voice. She’d wanted to come in here and coddle him and praise him for enduring such a long separation, and now she was going to have to fucking punish him. Again. And she couldn’t get herself out of it, because she’d _just_ resolved to do whatever she needed to.

“There’s a needle in your arm,” Clint said, deadpan. “Those needles hurt. I know. I had some of them in my legs.” He blinked once and looked up at Natasha. “You put them there.”

“Yes, I did. Do you remember why?” He was going to pass out at any minute.

“Did something. I always do something. Why do _you_ have a needle in you?”

“You put it there. I assume that means that you also went across the line and dug them out of the back.”

Clint jerked his hands away, and Natasha let him, taking the opportunity to draw the needle out and drop it on the floor.

“It’s because you left me,” he said, and then his sudden anger was back, and his eyes flashed. He clenched his hands into fists and his whole body tensed as he screamed, “You fucking left me here to die!” He leaned forward when he yelled, raising up almost onto his tiptoes.

“I did leave you,” Natasha said calmly. “That was my prerogative. But I did not leave you to die.”

“You didn’t say anything,” he screamed again. His body language told her that he was trying to decide whether or not to attack her again, and she braced herself for the possible impact. She wouldn’t underestimate how much strength he had left in him again.

Instead, however, he chose to take a step back and fist his hands in his hair.

“You can’t do that!” he screamed. “You can’t do that, just say things like you say and then leave.” He turned suddenly and picked up the plate from his bed. The porcelain plate that she’d brought him the pirozhki on.

She had a split-second to see that he’d licked it clean. The crumbs that had been left when she’d last seen it were gone, like it had been sent through the dishwasher. She could suddenly see Clint sitting on the bed, abandoning his self-respect and dragging his tongue along the plate over and over and over again, hoping to get a few calories off of it.

Then she was dragged back to real time when Clint threw the plate on the floor and it smashed into shards, some of which skittered all the way to the wall. They both stared down at the pieces.

“You fucking left and you didn’t say shit. Don’t do that to me.”

“What I do and do not decide to do with you isn’t your call. You don’t make the decisions here. You just accept them.”

“I don’t accept that one. I don’t.”

He was staring at the floor with tensed body and clenched fists, but he was still watching her out of the corner of his eye. On some instinct she opened her arms toward him.

He moved to her as quickly as he had when he’d been attacking her, but she didn’t fear that this time. He collided with her hard enough that she had to take a step back in order to keep her balance. Then he wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his face in her chest, and the catch in his breathing was her only warning before he started sobbing in to her shirt.

“Oh, Clint,” she breathed. She hooked one arm under his knee and hitched it up to her waist, and he took the hint, moving his arms up to encircle her neck and drawing up his other leg so he could wrap his thighs around her waist.

She carried him gently to the bed, _god he was getting so thin_ , and carefully climbed onto it so she could sit with her back against the wall and with an armful of Clint in her lap.

“You can’t fucking leave me,” he sobbed. “Everyone fucking leaves me. So you gotta stay, even with all your psycho bullshit you’re dragging me through. All that. Maybe I need all that.”

“Maybe you need all that?” she echoed.

“Yeah, like, maybe there’s a reason no one stuck around.”

Gods, he was sobbing so hard it was difficult to understand him, and that fact that he’d buried his face in her shoulder muffled the noise and made it even more difficult. She wrapped one arm around him and gently turned his face to the side, so she could hear him better.

“What do you mean, Clint?” she asked gently, rubbing her hands up and down his back. All the tension had completely drained out of him, and whatever strength he had retained was gone now. He just laid there, draped over her body.

“I mean no one else fucking wants me. So just do it. Make me something you want. Whatever it is. Just, do what you have to do. But really do it. Finish it. Make me _exactly_ what you want so you can’t ever ever leave. You can’t ever _ever_ leave.”

He was trying to get riled up again, and she could feel his leg twitching like he was attempting to get his knees under him. But he just didn’t have the strength, and he gave up the effort after a few seconds.

He fell asleep like that, with her shirt clenched in his fists like babies do. Babies, who don’t know anything and yet still know to hold on to people with all their tiny strength.

She had to work hard to untangle his grip without waking him, but she worked at his fingers carefully and persistently, until they slipped free. Then she left, going to get him some kind of food that he wouldn’t throw up.

It wasn’t until she was walking back to the room, container of cheese and crackers in one hand and IV bag in the other, that she had the sudden realization that she could have lost him in an entirely different way.

She’d left him there, for five days, with only water. Except, no one had been there to make him drink it. No one had been checking up on him. If he had decided, in those moments, to finish himself rather than let her have him, he could have done it. He could have done it with time to spare. And that fucking needle! That fucking needle could have just as easily gone into his own eye as her arm.

When she opened the door, her hands were shaking again.

***

He startled awake when she came in again, looking around for her wildly and starting to panic before his eyes alighted on her entrance.

“I’m here,” she reassured him. “Lay down.”

He did so immediately, but his eyes still followed her movements as she walked around to the front.

“Am I in trouble?” he asked, while he watched her put the IV in his arm.

“Yes,” she said. “But we’re gonna wait on it for a bit.”

“But I still need to be punished.”

“Yes. I’m going to punish you, Clint.”

“But you’re still calling me Clint.”

“I said that we’re going to wait on it for a bit.”

“Sorry. Sorry, I heard you, I’m listening, I promise.” He tried to sit up as he spoke, but she firmly pushed him back down.

“I’m not angry at you for not hearing that the first time. You’re very malnourished right now. I’m not expecting a lot from you.” She smiled grimly. “Excepting, of course, that I’m still expecting you not to attack me. So we will definitely talk about that, but right now I want you to feel better.”

Clint buried his face in the pillow.

“It made sense at the time,” he said, muffled through the barrier of the pillow.

“It was still a fucking stupid thing for you to do.”

“Mmmm,” Clint responded. “Well, what else is new?”

“And Clint?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got a promise for you, ok? I promise I’m not leaving. Whatever you have to be, to make that I reality, I will make you into. That’s my promise, ok? I will make you into something I can keep. And then you’re mine forever.”

“Mmmm,” Clint said again, but he was more asleep than not.

***

A day or so later, when he was able to stand on his own two feet with her fearing he’d eat pavement, she tied him to his place on the other side of the room, pumped him full of the strongest aphrodisiac that the lab could still guarantee wouldn’t kill its target, and left him untouched and strung up until it wore off.

The sweaty whimpering mess she returned to could barely speak, but when she whispered, “Next time I leave you for a mission, I could definitely make it worse,” he still managed a pitiable drawn-out whining noise.

It wasn’t much of a punishment, as far as punishments went. But then, it hadn’t been much of an offense.

***

It took a few weeks, but they finally found their rhythm. Natasha hadn’t been sent out on any long-term missions yet, and that was still a fear hovering in the backs of their minds, but they at least figured out the logistics of what they did have.

Natasha left a few of her Russian-MREs in the back, to be used in case of emergencies, and she tried to give him a heads up of how many days she’d be gone. It still wasn’t easy for him, given how isolated her departures left him, but they both gritted their teeth and dealt with it.

“You’re a side project,” she reminded him. “They don’t care what happens to you as much as they care what happens on my missions.”

“Side project,” he echoed. “To them though, right? I’m more than a side project to you.”

“Clint,” she admonished. “You’re a side project to me, too. These missions are much more important to me than you are.”

“Sorry,” he muttered, burrowing closer in to her. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s all right,” she soothed. “I’m your whole world in here. It’s easy to see how you would come to believe the same of me. We know the truth that we see.”

***

She taught him how to play poker, which he’d somehow never picked up despite his life story. He taught her how to play the Game of Mao, which almost got her to stab him right there.

“You’re fucking making these up,” she seethed, picking up her newest card.

“Penalty for talking,” Clint grinned, tossing her another card. Fucking shit eating grin that was just _asking_ her to wipe it off his face. But he’d said she probably couldn’t figure the game out, and – although she’d recognized that shitty attempt at reverse psychology – she’d wouldn’t let him be able to call her a quitter.

***

“Lie down,” she ordered. Then, when he started to obey, she corrected, “No, on the floor. On your stomach.”

“What are we doing?” he asked, casually sprawled across the floor. Comfortable, in a way. This was his home, after all.

“Shhh,” she chided, slapping his ass. “This is no-talking time for you. Just close your eyes and breathe.”

“You sound like the beginning of a bad porno,” he muttered. So she slapped his ass again, harder, making him squeak.

“Did I stutter when I told you to shut up?” she asked.

“Sorry, I was fascinated by – _un_ – by the floor – _ung_.”

“Keep talking, and I keep spanking.”

“Promises, promises,” he snarked back at her. She filed that particular fact away for future reference, and positioned her fingers so they were just touching his balls from where they laid against the floor underneath him.

“Anything else to say?” she asked sweetly.

She felt like she could see him actively deliberating. Weighing the potential of what she might do, considering how close he could get to the line today. She couldn’t help the quirk of her lips as she saw him actually considering letting her hurt him there, _just_ to get in one last word, but he came to his senses eventually. He shook his head once, forehead rubbing against the floor.

“Glad to hear it,” she remarked dryly, unzipping the case she’d brought in with her.

He started to turn his head toward her, to look at what she was unpacking, but hesitated like he wasn’t sure he could.

“You can look,” she said. “I said lie down and don’t talk. Those are the only rules I have in effect right now.”

“And breathe,” he added, and the glint in his eye and the way he bit his cheek to keep from smiling told her more than enough about how on purpose that had been.

“You little shit,” she said. She pinned his thigh down with one hand and flicked his balls hard with the other.

“Fuck,” Clint moaned arching his back and rolling his shoulders. Then he gasped, realizing he’d just spoken again, and said, “No, wait, I’m sorry! I- _amph_!”

He managed to bite his lips into silence with that one, and – if she wasn’t mistaken – buck his hips. After that, he just panted into the floor, and she slowly released his leg as the minute of silence stretched on.

“You bring this on yourself,” she reminded him, ignoring the fact that that little shoulder shake of his was probably laughter. “Now, deep breaths.”

She’d apparently scratched whatever itch he’d gotten under his skin, because he began doing as she said as soon as she said it. First a heavy sigh, and then slow deep calming breaths. The kind of breaths you take when your target isn’t in sight yet, but you know they’re about to be.

She watched him watch her hands, while she finished unzipping the case without looking. She pulled out several watercolor paints, and multiple different types of brushes. She laid them out along the ground, all in a perfect row, and then stood to fill the cup with water from the sink.

“Good,” she praised, when she set the water cup down. Then she went to grab his pillow off the bed.

“Up,” she ordered, tapping his shoulder, prompting him to get his elbows underneath him and raise his chest off the floor. Then back down again, so his chest laid on the pillow and his head laid on his folded arms.

“Rather have it under my dick,” he muttered, and she raised her eyebrows at him. The answering wide eyes and wince told her that that one hadn’t been on purpose at all, but it still earned him another flick. Which earned her a long drawn out hiss of pain.

“So spread your legs more,” she chided. “And learn when to use your mouth, or I’m going to have to gag you.”

That earned her a not-playing shake of the head, either affirming he wouldn’t speak or just refuting the idea of the gag. That was another thing she’d picked up about Clint. He didn’t handle restrictions well. His body was one thing, but his senses were another. Gags and blindfolds and noise-cancelling headphones, those all got him unsettled and writhing long before anything else could.

One day, she’d have to get him in suspension bondage, and put him in all three; hanging there and immune to the world, except for the slightest brushes across his skin. Gods, she bet herself that she could make him scream with nothing but her fingertips.

But that was later. This was now, and she settled down to sit crisscross on the floor beside him. Choosing one of the smallest brushes, she wet it and dipped it in the blue, then slid it along Clint’s back.

As expected, he handled the relatively tiny pin-point of a sensation as poorly as he always did. At least he settled for twitching almost spasmodically, accompanied by a high-pitched whining noise. Apparently the gag-threat had finally shut his mouth. And the rest of the noises were fine. She was actually looking forward to it.

She put down the small brush and instead rose up onto her knees and began massaging his back. As always – as expected – he was tense, even without the threat of impending punishment, and she began to work out the kinks. She started with his neck, holding her body poised above him while she dug in with her thumbs and forced even his muscles to submit to her. She warmed his skin with the slide of her palms and the unforgiving press of her fingers until, eventually, the muscles began to loosen.

She could feel his ribs and almost the entirety of his spine. Even his hipbones jutted out of his body dangerously. She was going to have to up his calorie intake. Especially now that she didn’t fear his attacking her. It was time to start building back his muscle mass.

When she reached the tops of his thighs she leaned down to kiss the scars left by the needles, all while she soothed his balls with her fingers, where she’d flicked at him earlier. He was hard again, and they were definitely going to have to talk about the fact that that kept happening, sooner or later. For now, however, she was enjoying the way that the avoidance of the subject was probably unsettling him more than anything else.

So, again, she let it be and sat back on her heels to re-choose a brush. As she’d been hoping, Clint was breathing more slowly. It was a different kind of slowly than a sniper-in-waiting. This was the steady breath of someone who is warm and drowsy while lying somewhere that they don’t mind falling into a deep sleep.

She chose a medium brush this time, sliding it around in the blue again, and then painted a long slow stripe down his spine. He flinched at the first touch of the cold water, but not enough to even begin to get him tense again. Just a reflex reaction of his skin.

The press of the brush brought out the excess water she’d let the brush carry, and drips ran down on either side of his back, wrapping his chest like ribs of their own. Light blue pale ribs that ran all the way down his back, rather than stopping halfway. She had to re-dip the brush several times, but she didn’t mind. The slow slide of the brush, mimicking the slide of her tongue last time, was soothing to her, too. She could hear the drag of it. The bristles were rough and caught on the texture of his skin, even with the paint and water between them.

She let the last drips slide down into the crack of his ass, letting the tip of the brush slide between his cheeks where she twirled it, rubbing her fingers together where they held the handle. His breathing had picked up again, and she soothed him with gentle hushing noises and a soft hand on the back of his neck.

She picked a sponge brush next, because she’d like the sound of the bristles against him and she wanted to hear more clearly. The scratch of it would be more than audible in the silent room, and more than effective along his sensitized skin.

She slid it full of red this time, and painting long horizontal stripes this time, crossing the thin blue pools. Water was dripping everywhere now, turning into purple where the streams collided into swirls. The floor underneath him was slowly soaking, and the water was seeping between his stomach and the concrete.

Then she used the thinnest brush again, and tip-tipped little red dots in lines down his arms and legs, little dots like raised bumps, except sometimes one would get too heavy and fall over the curve of his extremity to splat softly against the floor.

They continued like that, the one-sided give and take stretching time to slow between them. The colors and pattern didn’t matter in the end, fading slowly into a mess of indistinguishable color in a growing puddle around him. Every time he shivered, little ripples fluttered through the pooling water around him.

He was lying still like the dead, by the time she finished. His breathing had slowed beyond what she’d expected and he was melting into the pool of paint water and concrete. She leaned over him to look at his face, and the motion made him shift his head ever-so-slightly to look at her. His pupils were blown again, and he blinked slowly. So slowly. Like his eyes got stuck closed for a moment, or like he just wasn’t in any hurry to open them.

“Hey there,” she greeted softly.

He just smiled at her and closed his eyes again.

***

She tried eyeliner, too. She’d always though it was unfair that boys didn’t wear eyeliner. Not in normal company, anyway. Not that she couldn’t appreciate the image of a smirking girl in perfect eyeliner, but there was just something about a boy with that perfect cut of black ink around his eyes.

“Hold still,” she ordered.

“You’ve got that really fucking close to my eye,” he whined, but he made his best attempt to keep still, freezing his face with his eyes wide open. She could see the muscles and tendons in his neck bulging out of his skin as he tried to force his body into submission to her.

“Your eyes are open too wide, I can’t get at where I need to,” she corrected him. “I’m not going to poke you in the eye.”

“I believe you on a conscious level,” Clint said. “Now, try convincing my subconscious. That’s the bit that won’t comply here.”

“Uh huh. Sure. How about this, sit still and tell me a joke.”

“A joke, huh?” he grinned, which smooshed his eyes together too much for her to be able to reach where she needed, and she didn’t really mind at all.

“Um…” he mused. “How about this one. A slice of bacon, a piece of toast, and a fried egg walk into a bar. The bartender looks them up and down and says, ‘sorry, we don’t serve breakfast here.’ ”

“Oh my god, I literally asked for this.”

“Ok, ok, I’ve got another one. Ready? What’s the different between ignorance and apathy?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Natasha answered.

“Fuck you, you cheater.”

“Sorry,” she smirked. “Heard it before.”

“Ok, fine, try this one. Why didn’t the toilet paper cross the road?”

“I’m already scared of this one.”

“It got stuck in a crack!”

“Oh my god, you’re done. No more. No more shitty jokes. I have officially banned you from jokes. You’re cut off.”

“You just can’t handle the truth,” Clint cackled.

“What fucking truth? There’s wasn’t truth there, just shitty jokes. And you know what, if you can’t keep still, I will make you sit still.”

She shoved him backwards with a palm to the chest and moved like lightening to straddle him and pin him down beneath her. She leaned forward and pressed a forearm to his throat, compressing his windpipe until he stilled sufficiently.

“Done moving?” she quipped.

“Sure,” he rasped. “If you wanna turn it into a power trip, guess I’m done.”

She hummed non-committedly, and kept her forearm where it was, although she loosened it so it wasn’t pressing into his airflow. Then she rested her wrist on his face and finished the eye.

“There,” she said, sitting back up. “Done.”

“That’s all that you had left?” he whined. “I could have sat still for that.”

“And yet you didn’t,” Natasha reminded him, putting away the makeup. Then she sat back and looked at him, smirking in approval.

“Jeez you look at me like that and I feel all naked,” he said, making her laugh again.

“Does it bother you?” she asked. “Being naked all the time?”

“Why, you thinking about giving me some clothes?” he raised one eyebrow in amusement. “But seriously, though. I guess not. I'm hardly a fan of clothes in real life, and it’s just you here anyway. Seems pointless to make it a thing with you. Too late now.”

“Too late now,” she echoed in amusement.

“Yeah. Besides, I guess I feel a little bit sorry for you, you know? Guess this is the only cock you’re spotting these days. Well, outside of your targets anyway.”

He’d obviously meant it to be a joke, but it cut under her skin somehow and she had to stop her eye from twitching.

“I mean,” he continued, “how many friends can you really have in a place like this, right? Never know who’s going to stab you in your back. I mean, maybe if you’re not completely psychotic, you can make some buddies, but you’re the fucking Black Widow. No one’s going to mess around with you.”

Okay, he was actually annoying her now, and she couldn’t figure out why. Something about the nonchalant nature of his voice. The fact that he wasn’t teasing her, but just talking about things that he apparently considered facts.

“Besides,” he added. “Why else would you need to make a friend? That’s the kind of thing that Stark guy does. SHIELD’s watching him, but I think it’s pointless. He just holes himself up with robots that play nice with him because god knows no one else does. Not for long, anyway. Kinda like you.”

She slapped him. Not a powerful slap from someone in a position of authority to someone beneath them. Not a play from her hand of cards to punish or correct. Just a petty stinging slap, mostly with the tips of her fingers that barely moved his hand.

His eyes widened in surprise, and he moved his hand up to cover the reddening spot on his cheek. His eyes flicked back and forth, as though he was trying to read her like a book, but he just seemed to find something that made him afraid.

“You’re pissing me off,” she snapped, no hint of playfulness in her voice, and it dropped him like a rock.

“Sorry,” he muttered, at the floor. He drew his legs up so his knees were at his chin and hugged them tightly to himself. He blinked a couple of times and then made a move to wipe at his eyes with the back of his hand.

She slapped him again and snapped, “Don’t touch your fucking eyes when I just finished them.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I’m…god, I’m sorry.” He was literally crying, tears that he’d made the motion to wipe away were spilling down his cheeks. Silently crying, though. No sobbing. Just tears.

“You’re already crying?” she said with disdain, and it only made him duck his head to try and hide.

She let him blubber for a few minutes, quickly giving up on the eyeliner. It was probably ruined by now anyway. Eventually, she reached out and placed two fingers underneath his chin and drew his face up to look at her.

“Why are you crying?” she asked.

“I ruined it,” he answered. “We were having a really good time, and I ruined it. I’m so fucking stupid. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry I pissed you off. I’m really really sorry.”

“Stand up,” she snapped, doing the same as he complied. Then she took him by the hair – she really needed to give him a haircut – and marched him to the mirror above the sink. She position him just in front of it and ordered, “Look at yourself. Right in the eyes.”

She was right. His eyeliner was dripping down his face, even though she’d worked on it so carefully. She hadn’t anticipated needing waterproof with him, though that was obviously a miscalculation on her part.

At least he was obeying, sensing how precariously he was balanced on the edge of a knife.

“You’re fucking useless,” she told him. “Can’t hold still. Can’t keep from crying. Can’t keep from pissing me off for more than ten minutes at a time. We were having a really good time. I was, at least. You were apparently trying to figure out what to say to best shatter what we were doing.”

“I wasn’t,” Clint sobbed, because he was sobbing now. Full ugly crying.

“Don’t fucking talk to me,” she snapped. “Just listen. Just listen to the things you are. Like skinny. So stupidly skinny. What if you needed to climb to safety right now? What if you actually had to fight for your life? Fight to defend someone else? You couldn’t even take a punch right now. Couldn’t even draw a bow.”

He tucked his arms around himself in a semi-arm-cross, except lower, trying to hide his hipbones from the mirror. She slapped his hands away to hang by his sides again.

“Your hands, too,” she continued. “I’ve felt them. You’ve lost your callouses from the bowstring. From the touch of knives. You’re just all scars now, beneath my hands. Nothing but the imprint of past battles you either lost or almost lost. Your whole life is there. Your stumbling attempts at self-preservation etched in your skin.”

His eyes flitted away from his reflection, and she took his chin roughly and jerked his head. He took the hint and returned his gaze to his own. She kept the position though, wrapped around his body with her arms, holding his waist with one hand – to press him back into her – and to hold his face in place with the other.

“You are meaningless, in the wake of your destruction.”

He was crying so hard now. His face was snot and tears and dripping black eyeliner and his entire body was trembling.

“And you know what else you are?” she added, and felt his body physically wince underneath her. She leaned in close to his ear and whispered, “You’re mine.”

Again, she felt his physical reaction to that, except this time it was surprise, rather than self-flagellating disgust.

“Mine,” she repeated, kissing his neck. “Mine and fucking beautiful for it. Those marks, the ones I gave you, they’re mine. I made them. I put them there. They cover your old ones and remake you. Rebranded. Re-scarred. Rewritten. I have to struggle to find a way to touch you that doesn’t also touch the punishment you’ve earned from me, and you are beautiful for it.”

He closed his eyes again, and she let him, still speaking softly into his ear.

“You are fascinating. Sensitive and alive underneath me. You’re so far from boring that I breath with relief every time you speak. You’re funny and adorable and so easy to rend. I have every reaction I could ever want from you, right at my fingertips. You’re a perfectly tuned instrument, just waiting for me to run my hands along you.”

“Stop,” he whispered.

“Never,” she countered. “I will never stop. This was my promise to you, remember? I will never stop. I have broken you already. Now, I will remake you.”


	10. Chapter 10

They were asking about him. She’d known that he wouldn’t be able to pass under their radar for very long, but she’d been hoping for a little more time. Or, then again, maybe she was lucky she’d gotten this much at all.

Her reassurances that he was bending to her will with something akin to permanence would only go so far. While she’d been able to disperse the meeting, she could tell from the looks on people’s faces that they weren’t convinced. Most of them didn’t matter, but there were a few that did. A select few who had a lot of power and very little concern for collateral damage.

Them, she would have to convince.

At some point, she was going to have to take him around the base. Show him off, or something. Prove to them that Clint was becoming useful to them. Take away the word liability and replace it with the word possibility.

She understood why they were so hesitant. She herself was familiar with the legend of Hawkeye. He wasn’t the kind of guy you risked getting loose once you had him. So if she was going to win them over about him, it would have to be something spectacular.

She did have the advantage of the video footage, but no one was going to sit still and watching six-plus months worth of footage, just to reassure themselves that Clint wasn’t dangerous to them. It wasn’t their job to convince them, it was hers.

She’d have to come up with something to show them that would turn heads.

But not yet. Not quite yet. He was still soft and compliant under her hands, but she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. She expected one more big lash out. One more rebellion.

After that, she’d show them that he was putty in her hands.

***

It was after several weeks of soft gentle touches that he asked her to hurt him.

It wasn’t what she’d been expecting.

Of course she’d filed away the soft gasp and the almost-subtle comments on her open-handed slaps to his ass. But she hadn’t been expecting that. Not that way.

“Like a session?” she asked, because at first she hadn’t understood. Not that his asking for a session would have been any less shocking.

“No! Fuck, Nat. God, no. That’s not what I meant. Just like…you know what, nevermind. I don’t think I can explain it.”

It was the half-turn of his head, and the soft blush that was visible for only a second before he buried his face in his knees that finally managed to communicate what he wanted. What he was asking her for.

“You want me to spank you,” she said. “Or something like that. Something that hurts, but not session-hurt.”

“It’s stupid,” Clint said, picked at the fabric pills on the blanket beneath them.

“Hey,” she said, taking him by the chin and forcing his face up to look at her. “Don’t say things like that. Don’t talk about my things like that. You’re not yours to insult.”

“Sorry.” Then he grinned cockily. “Sorry, me. I won’t do it again. You always say that, and you always do it again. Yeah well this time I mean it. I don’t believe you.”

“Oh my god, stop,” Natasha snorted. “Stop…talking to yourself like that. Stop.”

“Your wish is my command,” he replied, and it didn’t have any of the bitterness that Natasha half-expected to be there.

“Hurt you, hm?” she asked, redirecting the conversation.

“Just a little,” Clint clarified. “Like, don’t go nuts or anything.”

“I’m sorry, are you attempting to clarify to what degree I should whip your ass?”

“Fuck. I shouldn’t have said anything. I take it all back. I forgot how you are with power-plays. I take everything back.”

“Hush,” Natasha said, pressing one finger to his lips. She let her playfulness fade into serenity. “I know what you’re asking for, Clint. Maybe I shouldn’t have teased you about it, but you’re just too much fun to rile up.”

“Yeah, cause you’re fucking terrifying.”

“Shh. We’re on my time now. Get on your knees by the side of the bed.”

She let the heady authority play into her tone of voice, and he closed his mouth with a snap. He blinked once, and then scrambled to obey, facing the bed and clenching his hands into fists where they hung at his sides.

“Place your hands behind your head,” Natasha ordered.

He did so, and Natasha caught a quiet “oh shit” spoken under his breath that was just too cute. She kept herself from laughing as she crossed the room and dug around in her options from the back. The materials there were more interested in torture than playtime, but she did manage to find a heavy ash paddle.

She walked back over to the bed and laid the paddle down on the mattress in front of him. She watched his breathing pick up when he saw it. His eyes were fixated on it, and his chest was heaving.

“Hey,” she chided, placing two fingers under his chin and tilting his face up to look at her, standing beside him. “This isn’t about the paddle. This isn’t even about the pain. You know that, or you wouldn’t have asked for this. Because this is about you and me. Just that. All right?”

He nodded once, pressing down against her fingers with the motion, and she was satisfied to see his breathing start to calm again.

“Do you want to touch it beforehand?” she asked. “Feel what it’s like?”

He shook his head, sharply, just once.

“All right. Bend over the bed. Rest your chest on it. Move around until you’re comfortable and can relax without thinking about your position.”

He ended up resting his head on his forearms while he kept his face turn to the left, which was the side of his she was standing on. It would also allow him to bury his face behind a barricade if the notion struck him. All of which was fine with her. She was still reeling with the sudden nature of the request. He was welcome to behave however he felt inclined to behave.

“Like to be able to see me?” she asked. And gods, she was giddy. That was the only word she could drag up from her multi-language vocabulary. He’d asked for this. Asked _her._ Like a prayer.

“I like to keep you in sight, yeah,” he answered.

And she began. She placed one hand on the small of his back and slapped the paddle down onto his ass. It wasn’t a hard stroke. They’d do hard strokes in a moment, but this was a warm up.

The angle was almost a little too low, since the bed didn’t bring him up as high as she would have liked, but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t deal with. Besides, excepting his slight jerk at the first stinging blow, he seemed comfortable and settled. She didn’t want to move him.

She focused the brunt of the second impact on his left cheek and then the third on his right. She repeated the pattern like that – both, left, right – for a few rounds, keeping her hand on his back so she could feel his responses to her.

When he started jerking a little with each stroke, she kneeled down on the floor and placed the paddle off to the side. She soothed her hands down his cheeks, keeping her touch light and comforting. She massaged at the top of his thighs, where she hadn’t yet placed any strokes and murmured into his skin.

She’d meant to murmur in English, and was startled to hear her voice in Russian. Like their first day together, when she’d praised him with words she didn’t mean and promises she had no intention of keeping.

“We’ve come a long way,” she said, still in Russian. She didn’t think Clint spoke Russian – at least, it wasn’t in his file – but she kept her voice low, just in case. Because she’d met a man who only had three fingers left because he’d thought Clint couldn’t shoot right handed. Underestimation was a tool in his belt just like it was one in hers.

After a brief kiss to the bottom of his spine, she retrieved the paddle and stood back up again. This time, her first stroke was heavier. The light pink blush to his cheeks was enough for her to consider him warmed up, and she smacked his left cheek with the weight of an actual blow.

Clint made a soft grunting noise and shifted his knees a bit. It occurred to her that she’d been remiss in setting him there without any kind of a pillow, but this wouldn’t last long this time. He’d manage.

“Here’s how this is going to go,” she said, laying a matching imprint of brighter red on his right cheek. “I have a number in mind, and that’s the number we’re going to go to. However, you also have five heavier strokes coming somewhere in the middle of these normal strokes.”

“These aren’t heavier strokes?” Clint snipped, but his voice was breathy and it ruined the effect of the sarcasm.

“No, they’re not,” Natasha assured him, hitting him twice more in quick succession, again on either cheek. “You’ll know a heavy spank when you feel it.”

“Calling them spanks like I’m fucking five,” he complained, and it made Natasha laugh darkly, though she didn’t say anything about the comment.

“Now,” she continued, “these five will come when you ask for them. While the spanking is going on, you have to ask me for them, one at a time.”

“What’s the catch?”

“The catch is that for every one you haven’t asked me for yet, by the time we’re done, you get double for, and all right in a row.”

“Seems – _ung_ – fair. Go ah – _un_ – ahead and give me a harder one.”

“That’s not asking, Clint.”

She did the next four quickly after that, letting them stray down onto his thighs and delivering them quickly enough that he didn’t have the capacity to get any word out. Eventually, he pushed though the sensation of the onslaught and managed to shout, “Please give me a harder one.”

“You sound like a porn star,” Natasha smirked.

“It’s your wording. Your cho-“ He was cut off by the promised stroke, and his response was beautiful. He screamed, raspy and toneful. His hands, which had been casually folded to hold his face, shot out straight, unbending to scrabble at the sheets in front of him.

“Fuck!” he shouted, when she smacked him again, normal strength. “Nat, that one hurt.”

“They all hurt,” she reminded him. “You’re just paying more attention now.”

“I don’t want any more hard ones.”

Natasha snorted. “Yeah, I guess I was the one who gave you that wording. Wasn’t thinking ahead. Still, I kind of like it. Like you’re begging me to fuck you.”

She’d dealt another four strokes during that mini-speech, and he was clearly feeling them more than he had before the requested punishing stroke. If he didn’t hurry up, he’d be very unhappy when they came to the end of her pre-decided number of strokes. If she stopped now, he’d get eight like that, all right in a row.

“Can I have another one?” he asked, and Natasha decided to let the change in wording go. She wouldn’t have been able to keep from laughing if he’d kept asking for “a hard one” like that.

This time, when she put her full strength and the weight of her twisting body into the stroke, Clint was more ready for her. It clearly hurt like fuck, but he tensed up his shoulders and not his ass, letting the impact rock him slightly forward. He still spasmodically grasped and released the sheets in front of him, but he also let out his breath in a long low moan that trailed down into a deeper noise.

Natasha felt an unfamiliar warmth spreading through her body, and she reflexively tightened her own body in a search for some kind of pressure between her legs.

_Well, shit._

It wasn’t like she was unfamiliar with the concept of sexual arousal. Hell, she’d fucked her way across forty-three nations and at least three royal lines. Arousal was her ally. Her weapon. Her control.

Still. She’d never stood several feet away from a moaning target and felt that heat. Sure some of them had caught her eye. Aesthetics were compelling, and some people were nothing but art incarnate. Besides, she’d also found herself succumbing to the biology of friction and neurology. She knew what it meant to come. To fuck. To writhe.

But that was when her targets were actually skilled, or eager to please. Or, on the rarer occasion, when she felt comfortable and safe enough to allow herself to feel like this at her own hand.

Not like this. Not watching, without anything pressing and pushing between her legs. Not fully clothed and in control of everything. Not without any preconceived intention.

She expected it to make her feel afraid. Out of control. But the more she thought about it, the more the heat built. She laid down another flurry of strokes that Clint had to shout through to ask for another burst of more intense pain. If she was being honest with herself, she’d lost track of the number of normal strokes. Both the number they were on and the arbitrary value she’d decided to bring them to.

It didn’t matter now anyway. She delivered the third harsh stroke, and that one incited a self-aborted attempt to climb up onto the bed to get away from her. A moment ago, she would have laughed at him, low and with dark promise, but now she just kept swinging.

His ass was bright red now. The series of harder strokes would probably surface into bruises soon, but they were still invisible at the moment.

And the sounds. The sounds were gorgeous, as was the way his shoulders were shifting from side to side while he tried to ground himself in any amount of normal reality he could find. Naked and ready for her and unlikely to stop her if she took him.

She couldn’t handle it anymore. She placed a steady pressure on Clint’s back, pressing him sharply down into the mattress

“Time’s up,” she told him sweetly.

“No, wait!” he squawked. “Can I have another harder one?”

“Too late. You get double. Lucky you that double of two is only four, I guess.”

“Don’t feel like it’s gonna be lucky,” he said, balling his hands into fists and burying his face in the sheets, behind the wall of his arms, obviously prepared for intense pain.

She didn’t disappoint. In part, she was punishing him for the sudden power he had over her, and she didn’t even care that it was a little petty. In consequence, the last four strikes were truly painful. Probably more than was fair for what was supposed to be a game. Even if it had been an unbalanced power-play of a game.

He screamed again, like he had for the first time, only this time it carried through all the strokes, simply rising into another crescendo at each impact. Then she tossed the paddle onto the floor, where it clattered loudly.

“Oh, Clint,” she sighed into his skin. “You were great. You were fabulous, really. Oh my god, look at you.” She kissed him, the heat from his skin warming her lips as she reached down to trail her fingers along his perineum, expecting him to part his thighs to let her reach farther.

However, he made a half-noise of protest, and kept his legs tight together. He pushed up with his hands until he was standing on his knees and took several deep breaths.

“Don’t want to get off?” Natasha asked.

Clint smiled shakily, but he didn’t look up or respond. Instead, he took another slow breath and used his hands against the bed to push himself up into standing position. Natasha’s good mood was fading. Something was off here.

“Fuck, that hurt,” Clint sighed, twisting his shoulders like he was trying to work out a kink. Natasha suspected it was more likely that his ass was throbbing and the pain was radiating up his body.

Honestly, though, she wasn’t really paying attention to that. She was more focused on Clint’s dick, hanging limp with barely any arousal.

“So, you actually really don’t want to get off,” she said slowly. She hadn’t anticipated that. He’d gotten hard for her before, during other painful interactions. And he’d practically asked for a spanking. He’d definitely asked her to hurt him.

“Um, I’m fine,” Clint said, sheepish grin on his face. “What about you, though. Did you like it?”

Did she like it. Did _she_ like it.

That had been about her?

“Why do you ask?” she said calmly.

Clint ran his fingers through his hair, obvious anxiety in the movement, and said, “I thought you might like it. Seemed like something you’d like.”

He’d been fucking playing her? Anger bubbled underneath her heart and her hands shook with the intensity of the sudden emotion. She forced the tell off her face and willed her body into stillness only because she’d had years of practice. Clint, however, still managed to pick up on something being off.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did I do something?”

“Clint,” Natasha said careful, deceptive calm in her voice. “I want you to think about this answer very carefully. Because I’m going to ask you a question, and there are some things you can say that will get you in an awful lot of trouble.”

Clint licked his lips nervously and gave her his full attention.

“Why,” she enunciated clearly, “did you decide to ask me for something you thought I’d like, when it wasn’t something you’d like?”

He blinked once, in some kind of surprise. Clearly not a question he’d been expecting. But then, it seemed he hadn’t been expecting any question. She was calming down and paying more attention, and she could see Clint’s genuine confusion and hurt at her sudden possible anger.

And of course, now that she was thinking about it clearly, Clint hadn’t usually been turned on by pain. No, it had been the gentle slide of her hands along his body or the soft words in his ear. If pain had been present, it hadn’t been the prevalent point.

Her fault.

So stupid.

“The only thing I can think of to say,” Clint said slowly, “is that I thought it would make you happy.”

“So you were being manipulative.”

He shrugged and said, “Can you really blame me?”

She could. She could if she wanted to. She could add “manipulative” to the list of things that he wasn’t allowed to be. She could tie him down and break him open. She could make him scream. Or leave him alone. Or abandon him. Or turn him over to her authorities with a shrug of the shoulder and a “I guess he’s just unmanageable.”

“I don’t like being manipulated,” she said. But the anger was gone.

“Sorry. I mean, I’ll probably do it again. But, sorry.” He shuffled his weight back and forth from foot to foot for a moment, and then added, “Am I in trouble?”

“No.” She wasn’t sure of much, but she was sure of that.

He breathed with relief when she gave him that answer, and then smiled shyly up at her.

“So,” he said. “What about _you_? You want to get off?”

She slapped him, hard enough to turn his head, but without real anger. He knew it too, from the way he grinned at the floor. Even his mumbled “sorry” was bullshit, and they both knew it.

“You’re still a smartass,” she muttered.

“And you fucking love it,” he countered.

“Get back on your knees. Since this is apparently about me, I want to take another look at you.”

He obliged quickly, bending back over the bed and displaying his red ass. The outer edges of the paddle marks were fading into bruises, and she knew he’d feel it for a day or so. Probably not for much more than that, though.

Mostly she’d just wanted him face down so she could think through what had just happened. She felt jerked around like a rag doll. She’d been elated that he’d asked her to hurt him, but she’d felt that way because she’d known he wasn’t there yet. She’d _known_.

Gods, she’d been so stupid. She’d known, but she’d been so eager to believe it that she’d fallen for it. So excited to believe that he was seeking arousal from her. That he wanted to deepen the intimacy between them.

And the worst part was, there really wasn’t anything to punish him for. He’d been trying to make her happy. To placate her, the way any captive would. He’d tried to be smart, and it wasn’t his fault she’d thought it was something more than it was.

It wasn’t his fault that her blood had rushed at the sound of him.

In a way, she punished him anyway. Not by active retaliation, but by sudden abandonment. She knew, on a biological level, that he’d most likely experience some kind of a backlash from his own body. If he hadn’t been deep enough to get an endorphin high, he’d probably still have some kind of a drop from the willing humiliation of it all.

She should stay. And she would have, if she hadn’t been so pissed. But she was pissed, and so she just left without another word.

***

He attacked her when she came back the next morning. The moment the door was open just a crack, he was wrenching it the rest of the way open. She let go of the handle as soon as she felt the change in momentum, keeping herself from being dragged along with it.

He’d fashioned a shiv of some kind. He’d broken the mirror above the sink and made a handle out of the sheets. All of it was held together with electrodes and copper wiring from one of the electrical torture devices in the back.

It hurt.

Not the knife itself. He didn’t even get close enough to her with the knife for it to do any damage. But the fact that he’d made it hurt. It cut more deeply than the cheap and ineffective weapon alone ever could have. Because that wasn’t a knife for escaping, that was a knife for killing.

It was evident in the way he held it and in the way he came after her, even after she stepped away from the door. He snarled at her with vicious primal terror, and something there told her, _it’s you or me this time._

The fight was longer than it would have been with anyone else. Clint was weakened, but desperate. He had no qualms about coming out of the fight dead right along with her. Natasha was hindered by having to try and avoid both those options.

“I’m not yours!” he screamed, when she finally twisted the makeshift knife out of his hand. She tossed it across the room, and shoved him forward, away from her, so she could wrench his arm behind his back and force him to march across the red line.

“Wrong,” she snapped, with a twist to her mouth.

“You can’t make me yours!” he screamed again. “Stop making me yours. I’m not yours!”

And it _hurt_ because he had to be hers. He was the _only_ thing that was hers. Because he told her to make him into something she would want forever, but he was still fighting her on it.

“Sorry, love,” she sighed, securing him on his knees in the middle of the room. “Looks like I’m going to have to shatter you, one more time.”

She didn’t spare any expense for time when she made her selections from the back. Electrical devices, the whip, the cane, knives, all manners of possible types of punishment she could come up with. Except the cigarettes. Those were for intimate pain. This would be anything but intimate.

In the end, she practically flayed him, continuing long past the point where he’d begun to apologize and beg for mercy. Long past the point where it began to leave a horrifying taste in her mouth. Past the point of wordless whimpers that sometimes crescendoed up into “please please please” and “why won’t you stop?” and once, heartbreakingly, “I thought you loved me.”

She took it past the point of her own stomach, and had to vomit into the toilet on two separate occasions. She had to wake him back up twice, and had to run an IV while he was still being punished, because the blood loss and the shock were getting to be too much too quickly and she couldn’t slow down. Not this time.

The third time he passed out, she took him by the chin and shook his face roughly. His blood was everywhere, ruining her clothes and her fingers, making his face slippery and warm.

She shook him awake, and he surfaced with a cry and a mostly-unintelligible apology.

“Shut up,” she told him, and he took a great deep breath, like someone gasping for air after being underwater for far too long, because those were the first words she’d spoken to him since they’d begun.

“Tell me the location of the SHIELD base you were last stationed at,” she ordered.

She didn’t give a shit. Not really. This had never been about SHIELD to her. The location of the base was probably outdated anyway. The outer ones moved around so much. The point wasn’t the answer. The point was the giving of the answer.

The point was that he didn’t even hesitate, spewing out a string of numbers that could only be coordinates. The point was that she knew they were true.

_There are no lies in this room._

She let him down from where he was hanging with a simultaneous click of opening locks, and he fell to his knees with the force of gravity and the heaviness of his own turning.

“We’re not done yet,” she told him, as he soundlessly sagged forward into the floor. “We’re going to take a walk about the base. Or, more to the point, I’m going to take a walk around the base. You’re going to crawl. Keep up, or find yourself back at the outer edges of my displeasure.”

She’d taken off her jacket long ago, and the light gray tank top she wore underneath was flecked and dripped with blood and had an imprint of Clint’s bleeding back along one side where she’d pressed into him while adjusting the electrodes. Her cargo pants were even worse, although the darker color hid the blood better. Still, it was hard to miss the tacky drying substance.

She knelt and unlaced her boots, kicking them off her feet and pulling off her socks, as well. She stood, barefoot in the pooling blood, and wiggled her toes until her skin was covered. She even took the time to redo her ponytail, so every hair was in place. Red hair flecked and streaked with red blood. Even her face was smudged with it, but it was all perfect control.

She strode to the door, glancing back to see Clint struggling to follow her, on his bleeding hands and knees, moving slowly but steadily as he followed the trail of her bloody footprints.

She opened the door, watching him for any sign that he’d recognized that he was about to be on the other side of his prison for the first time in so many months, but he didn’t even take his eyes off the ground, shuffling from one footprint to the next as his series of goals.

Well, those wouldn’t last much longer. He’d have to rally and get his eyes on her sooner or later. But she’d leave it up to him. She was satisfied.

It was time to satisfy her superiors.

She knew the image they cut. Bloody triumphant Widow with the naked broken Hawkeye crawling behind her. People pressed backward into the wall to get away from them, horrified by the possibility that the situation would somehow touch them. The murmured curses of surprise, in many different languages, turned her mouth into a smirk.

She made sure to keep her walk casual, both to allow Clint to keep up and to show that she was in no hurry. There was no anxiety here. She could be fucking bored, for all the onlookers knew.

The secretary outside the meeting room tried to stop her, but she didn’t try very hard. Natasha shoved open the heavy double doors with so much force that they swung all the way and bounced off the walls on either side.

The room itself was well lit and full of the more powerful leaders of the organization. They were seated in a circle around a table, discussing the blueprint hologram in the middle. Clearly some kind of strategy meeting.

Or, it had been a strategy meeting. Now it was her meeting.

She took a few more steps into the room and stopped walking. Clint shuffled the last couple of feet and leaned against her leg in relief at not being forced to move anymore, even if it only turned out to be for a few seconds.

“Pet,” she said down at him. “This room is filled with the highest ranking enemies of SHIELD’s attempts at their version of peace and justice. Everyone you’ve seen on a most-wanted list has been in the room at some point, and many of them are here now.”

There was the beginning of murmured protests from the circle, but they quickly escalated into cries of terror and outrage when she jerked her pistol out of her hip holster and dropped it on the floor in front of him.

He saw it. She knew he saw it. She knew he could be just as quick and accurate with that gun as he could be with a bow. Especially at distances like this. She knew. Clint knew. Everybody in that room knew.

And everybody in that room watched him jerk his hands back from where the weapon fell, letting it hit the floor and bounce a few times before it lay a few feet from his hands. He didn’t even look at it, after that, instead burying his face in the side of her knee and closing his eyes.

“I submit a request,” Natasha announced to the room. “To begin training Hawkeye as an agent of this organization, under my guidance and as my responsibility, with the promise that he will become a loyal and irreplaceable asset.”

There was about ten seconds of shocked silence before one of the men began laughing. It started as a low chuckle, but it developed into a loud and roaring full-belly laugh. Everyone around him glanced at him nervously, and Natasha subsequently identified him as the most powerful person in the room.

“Ah,” he sighed eventually. “Наш маленький паук. Your request is granted. I look forward to the results.”

Natasha bent down and scooped Clint up in her arms, bowed her head in respect, and left the room as quickly as she could safely allow herself to do so. She suspected a reaction like that meant the man was decided, but she wasn’t about to hang around and risk an argument and a reversed decision.

Clint was shaking while he was carried, murmuring “did I do good?” over and over and over again. He’d picked up then, at least, that some kind of presentation had just been made.

“You did perfect,” she told him, and kissed his face.

She didn’t take him back to his cell. Instead, she carried him, dripping blood and crying, to her own quarters. She settled him on her own bed, unconcerned by the mess, where she began to treat his wounds.

“This isn’t my bed,” he slurred, through a thick tongue and a dissociative state.

“It is now,” she told him. “Welcome home.”

“Home?” he echoed.

“That’s right.” She paused her first aid, and moved up to the head of the bed so she could kiss his bruised temple.

“Whose are you?” she whispered.

“Yours,” he answered, and he smiled when he said it.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's this? Two chapters in one day?? Well, I said I was gonna win NaNoWriMo and I MEANT IT!

The recovery took longer than ever. In fact, she ended up taking him down to medical, exercising his newfound security access. His condition got a few wary looks, but not many comments. Besides, he clung to her the whole time, refusing to let anyone touch him if she wasn’t also there.

She did leave him there, when they’d sedated him, but only because she got very specific – frantic – reassurance that he wouldn’t wake before she got back.

She had a living room to rearrange. That was an advantage of being someone as valuable as the Black Widow. You got two whole rooms to yourself, instead of one gray concrete square.

Not that she used the extra space for anything. She’d spent long enough living in one gray concrete square that it had seemed ridiculous to break the habit. However, now, it looked like she was going to use it for the first time. It currently had nothing but a broken couch and some boxes of files she thought might still be useful one day.

She didn’t have a lot of time, but she did wipe everything down and move the boxes into her bedroom. As for the couch, it wasn’t going to do anyone any good, so she shoved that into the corner. She pulled a foam mattress top out from under her bed – why anyone had ever though she’d put that on her bed she’d never understand – and covered it with extra blankets she filched from the laundry room. She also dragged one of her end tables into the room, positioning it next to the makeshift bed. She wasn’t sure why. It just seemed too empty without it.

It seemed empty with it, too, so she added her desk lamp at the last minute, although it ended up on the floor, again next to the bed. She thought about moving the boxes back in, just to take up more space, but she was quickly beginning to feel stupid. So she left, and went back up to medical to see how close Clint was to waking up.

***

When he was finally released by the doctors, she brought him back to their living space with one arm around his waist and one of his around her shoulders. She suspected that he didn’t really need that much help, but she was loathe to call him on it. Let him touch her if he wanted to.

He didn’t say much when they entered the room. She’d changed the sheets and wiped the floor clean, though she doubted he really remembered much of that night. When she showed him his room, though, he snorted in laughter.

“It looks like a pet’s room,” he laughed. “How appropriate.”

“You’re not my pet,” she corrected him.

“I’m your asset,” he replied.

So he did remember something of that night, then. But that wasn’t what she’d been hinting at. So she wrapped herself the rest of the way around his body and whispered in his ear.

“You’re just mine, Clint. That’s that only bit that matters. Whatever words you may or may not chose to put next are inconsequential. You’re just mine.”

“Guess so,” he sighed. “So, this is my room then?”

“Don’t mistake it as a privilege,” she warned him. “It’s not your space any more than this is your body. This is a place for you to be out of sight and out of mind when I need you to be. Can’t have you constantly in my way.”

“Yeah, I got it,” he said, looking at the floor.

Natasha rolled her eyes. “That doesn’t mean you’re not invited to anywhere else in here. Just, understand the motivations at play here. And don’t be so sensitive.”

“Don’t be sensitive,” he mocked. “You’re the one who made me sensitive. I don’t mind though, and I don’t think you do either.” He twisted around in her loose grasp and kissed her cheek.

“And what was that?” she asked.

“Thank you.”

***

She gave him a haircut. Sat him down in a chair in front of the bathroom mirror and told him to sit still. The chair was too short, really, and he could only see the top of his head – if anything at all – but he didn’t complain.

“Could you…” he began, but didn’t look like he was going to finish the thought without prompting.

“Just say it, Clint.”

“I don’t know how to say it. I just…I liked it when you washed my hair.”

“You want me to wash your hair?”

“I want you to touch my head like that.”

She obliged. His hair was too long and ratty to really run her fingers through, but she massaged his scalp and dragged her fingernails across his skin. Then, when he was sufficiently relaxed, she began to cut.

“Know what you’re doing?” he asked sleepily.

“Like you care,” she shot back. “But, just for your information, I do actually. I spent several weeks undercover in and out of a beauty salon. I figured it out pretty quickly.”

“Pretty quickly? As in, not immediately? As in, you totally ruined someone’s hair?”

“Multiple someone’s. They were dicks though. I didn’t much care.”

“You think everyone is a dick,” Clint laughed.

“Not true!”

“Name someone you don’t think is a dick.”

“You.”

“Cheater.”

She ended up cutting his hair pretty short, but not as short as it had been when he’d come to her. Definitely still long enough to curl her fingers in and tug him around with. Definitely still long enough to show it’s color.

She shaved him, too. Though his malnutrition and rough treatment hadn’t left him much more than a thin attempt facial hair. Still, the event was quite the experience. She used a straight razor – because why would she pass up that opportunity – and his reactions under her fingertips as she’d brought the knife to his throat had been something else entirely.

When she was done, she kissed his face all the places the razor had scraped clear.

***

Sometimes he slept in her bed with her, but sometimes she needed to be alone. Sometimes he needed to be alone, too. And sometimes he needed to sleep on the floor next to her bed, and she’d reach down in the night and card her fingers through his hair.

Sometimes it would wake him up, and he’d suck her fingers into his mouth like a dare.

***

“What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked, eyeing the uniform with distrust.

“You wear it, you stupid child. Don’t try and act like you’ve forgotten how clothes work. You weren’t down there that long.”

“You want me to wear pants?” he whined. “That was the only good part of being stuck down in the cell.”

“Yeah well, pants are apparently the price for your freedom then.”

“Rather go back in the cell,” he muttered, but he still slid his legs into the clothing obligingly.

***

She started taking him to the gym with her. He was clearly frustrated with his capabilities, and even more embarrassed at his shaky stance. But when he spit out angry curses after he ate mat yet again, after trying nothing more than a simple leg sweep, she ran her fingers through his hair and told him he was getting so much better. Then she kissed him sweetly.

No one in the gym laughed at him. No one really looked at them. There was something unnerving about he two of them, already starting to move as one as they sparred on the map. No one got both pinned and kissed by the Black Widow, unless they were never getting up again. But the Hawk was stumbling around like a child, falling on his face and missing obvious countermoves, and the Widow just kept smiling sweetly.

“It’s fucking frustrating and embarrassing,” Clint hissed, as she massaged his sore muscles under the hot shower water, trying to avoid the worst of his bruises. “I know this stuff. I see your attacks, and I know what to do, but my body won’t get there.”

“It will get there eventually,” she assured him. “But for now, entertain yourself by watching their faces. They’re more scared of you now than they ever were.”

“No one is scared of an enemy that eats mat every ten seconds.”

“They are when I praise you for it.”

***

He threw up the first time she fed him real food again. He’d been on the liquid diet for over a week, with all the recovery, but he was quickly game to try again, and they took it more slowly. Within a couple of days, he moved from soups to breads to vegetables and sandwiches and finally to whatever he felt like.

His face when she joined him in their room with an American-style pizza was completely worth the fact that she had had to personally promise a favor in return for it.

***

Four weeks after she’d brought him back from medical he finally kept his feet under him for a complicated defensive move. She hadn’t been expecting it, and his subsequent follow up attack actually made her lose her footing. She got it back quickly enough to readjust and take him to the ground, but he was grinning up at her in triumph.

“Did you see what I did?” he crowed. “Nat, did you see that?”

“Nice work, baby bird,” she smiled, kissing him on the nose. She let him go of her hold, and he scrambled to his feet, leaning out over the railings of the mat section they were working in and calling out to the small crowd there.

“Hope you all saw that,” he shouted. “I just made the Black Widow take a whole extra step before she pounded my face into the mat. An entire step, to get her balance back. I could fight any of you!”

Natasha laughed with real joy and leaned against the elastic with him.

“Anyone want to take him up on the offer?” she asked. “Fair warning, I fight at his back.”

No one was surprised when the only response were faces looking at the ground and people suddenly impossibly focused on their own workouts.

***

It wasn’t all good. There was the one day that she sent him up a floor to pick of a set of photos she was supposed to look over, and he didn’t come back. She didn’t really notice until she looked at her watch and it suddenly struck her how long it had been.

She flew out of the room with half-formed fears of attempted escapes, but the actuality was almost worse. She found him unconscious at the bottom of a stairwell, black eye forming across his face and at least one cracked rib.

“You should have seen the other guy,” he wheezed.

“I will,” she promised him.

And she did. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t see her.

She got officially written up and reprimanded for the incident, but she didn’t much care. Besides, as she reminded the committee, if the man hadn’t wanted to start a fight with her, he shouldn’t have touched her stuff.

The punishment was four weeks of desk work, confining her to the underground of the base. It was a miniscule punishment, and everyone knew it. Besides, with the way Clint sat at her feet while she worked, she couldn’t even really call it boring.

***

There were nightmares, too. He’d had a few of them when he’d been in the cell, but they were worse now. And, of course, he heard hers for the first time, too.

“Sucks,” he muttered, when one of them had woken the other. It was hard sometimes, to keep track of whose dream and woken whom.

“Life sucks,” she said bitterly.

“I don’t know. Not all of it.”

She didn’t respond out loud, but she did intertwine her fingers with his.

***

“Do you want to see this?” she asked.

She’d been given time on one of the more powerful base computers to do some hacking that she needed for an upcoming assignment – when she finally managed to get off desk duty – but she’d finished in less time than she’d needed, and had subsequently amused herself by hacking into Clint’s SHIELD file.

Clint glanced up from where he was entertaining himself by sitting at Natasha’s feet and unlacing and re-lacing her boots in different and increasingly complicated patterns.

“See what?” he asked.

“Your SHIELD file,” she said. “Thought you might get a kick out of it. Heaven knowns I like to laugh at some of the things that end up in my files. Both the fake identities and the real ones.”

Clint scrambled up to his feet and Natasha pulled him down to sit in her lap. The word DECEASED was written in capitalized red at the top of the screen, but neither of them paid it much attention.

“Let’s dig in,” he said, reaching for the keyboard. Then he jerked his hands back. “Mind if I drive?” he asked, and she smiled indulgently.

“Knock yourself out,” she said, with a wave of her hand at the screen. She honestly didn’t care anymore. He hadn’t fucked up his submission to her in any way that actually mattered since the horror that had been their last hours in that cell. If he wanted to operate the keyboard, he’d more than shown that little petty things like that weren’t going to go to his head.

He opened the physical performance reviews first, pointing out to her all the amazed comments and glowing commendations. Every evaluation held at top marks with only one exception.

“How the fuck did you miss points on a shooting range drill?” she asked, poking him in the ribs to make him go back a page.

His mouth turned down into a pout and he spat, “Got points off on almost all my evaluations that day.”

“Why?”

“Because Agent Tells is a fucking ass.”

“You pissed an evaluator off? That wasn’t very smart.”

“ ‘Not smart’ my ass. The piss-ant needed to be taught that no means no.”

Natasha snorted. “Someone tried to sexually coerce you? _You_? What were they thinking? Had they not met you?”

“Hadn’t been about me,” Clint snarled. “The prick cornered a rookie in the locker room and got his hand down her pants before someone intervened. He got written up, but Alice, that was the rookie, refused to testify, so there wasn’t a lot that could be done. Above the board anyway.”

“And you thought you’d manage something below the board?”

“I wasn’t the only one. Don’t know why he was surprised that a base full of spies would take matters into their own hands.”

“What happened to him?”

“Alice killed him. Stabbed him with a pen when he cornered her and blamed her for all his problems.”

“Good girl.”

Clint hummed in agreement.

“SHIELD sounds like a nice place,” she commented dryly.

Clint rolled his eyes. “Don’t be stupid. It’s not always like that. It was almost never like that. Everywhere has idiots that like making life hell for everyone around them.”

“Clint,” Natasha said. “You wanna try that first sentence again?”

He though about it for a moment, and then his eyes widened in fear.

“Shit,” he sputtered. “I wasn’t calling you stupid, I swear to god. It’s just a phrase. I didn’t actually mean to.”

“Mean not to,” she ordered, then gestured back at the screen, indicating he should keep going.

He tried. He flipped through several screens, back to the file summary, but his hands were shaking and he eventually stopped trying and twisted back around to face her.

“I can’t tell if you’re actually mad,” he said. “If maybe you’re going to be mad later or something.”

“Hey!” she snapped, loudly enough that he flinched. “Don’t fucking lump me in with your father. When I’m pissed, I’ll tell you. If I’m not, I’ll tell you that too, if you ask me.”

“Are you mad at me?” he asked.

She kissed him. Gentle and chaste. Just a press of her lips to his.

“No, I’m not mad.”

He breathed out in relief, and his air tasted sweet.

“Do you want to keep reading through?” she asked.

“Fuck yeah!” he answered, turning back to the screen. “I get the feeling I’m gonna love this next part. Always wanted to know what those docs were saying when they were scribbling and typing away.”

He clicked the psychological profiles link, and Natasha laughed.

“What?” he asked, pulling up one of his earlier ones.

“Nothing,” she answered. “I’m just anticipating these being a lot of fun.”

And they were. Natasha especially liked the one that called Clint a “dangerous hooligan” because who the fuck uses the word “hooligan” in a professional document? Clint’s favorite was obviously the one that called him a “master of the dying arts” and highly recommended him for a command position.

“He couldn’t have spent much time actually talking with you,” Natasha smirked.

“I’ll have you know, we spent a lot of time together actually.”

“Oh my god,” Natasha gapped. “You slept with him!”

“I did not! That’s not true! What kind of a dirty-ass gutter-mind do you have that that’s where your mind went? I saved his life in an extended overseas mission. We got stuck in Germany for a couple weeks. Why would you think that? Have _you_ ever slept with a psychologist for a specific evaluation?”

“Of course I have. I needed two weeks of down time when I was in Copenhagen, and I did what it took to get placed on temporary recovery.”

“That kind of thing goes on your permanent record,” Clint gaped. “What could you possibly have needed to do that was worth that kind of a mark on your psychological record?”

“Oh please,” Natasha scoffed. “After I’d done what I needed to do, I anonymously released a very edited video of the interaction that did not put that psychologist in a very good light, and subsequently appealed the ruling with my commanding officer. The whole thing was expunged and the doctor was executed.”

“You are fucking terrifying, you know that?”

Natasha shrugged. “He was a dick.”

“You think everyone’s a dick.”

“Not y-”

“Yeah, yeah,” he interrupted her. “Not me.”

“Done going through your files?” she asked.

“I want to see what the last one from my superior officers says. Just for kicks.” He wiggled around in her lap again, to open the final file, but suddenly jerked his hand back from the mouse like he’d been burned.

“What?” she said, sitting up to get a better look at the screen.

“Nothing,” Clint started, then opened and closed his mouth a few times before he shook his head and stood up. “It’s nothing. I just don’t want to read that one.”

Natasha gently pulled him back down onto her lap and reached around him to hover the mouse over the file.

“Tell me why.”

Clint gestured at the report summary. “Agent Coulson,” he said, like it was an explanation. “Good guy. Don’t think he liked me, though. I kinda don’t wanna hear his opinion on my shitty antics.”

Natasha opened the file, and Clint looked down at the floor immediately. She scanned the first few lines of the report, and then went back to begin reading out loud.

“Agent Clinton Barton is a credit to this organization,” she read, and Clint’s quiet intake of breath was sharp. “He has an unparalleled ability to see the situation from an overarching perspective, regardless of whatever chaos might be happening around him. While his temper often gets the best of him, I believe it stems from a consistent frustration with his own performance, and does not reflect any frustration with SHIELD as an organization. In fact, I suspect that previous behavior issues have originated from the actions of his superior officers, and have simply been amplified in Barton’s sensitive nature. His natural submissive tendencies are rampant and unchecked. This is obvious in the way simple praise captures his full attention, and in how the slightest touch on his shoulder can turn him into a live wire. To steal a phrase from Dr. Andrew Garner, the boy is affection starved. Not to mention touch starved, attention starved, praise starved, care starved, and structure starved. I firmly believe the right handler can turn him into an priceless asset, and I eagerly look forward to working with him.”

Clint had buried his face in his hands halfway through, and was shaking his head wildly. Natasha drew him into to lay on her chest as he tried to hold back tears.

“Well,” she sighed. “Looks like _someone_ was paying attention.”

“Too late,” Clint gasped into her shirt. “Too fucking late. He’s wrong. I was still gonna be a shit Agent. He should have been there three years ago, but it was already too late when he got there.”

“It’s all right,” Natasha soothed. “I know it hurts, but it’s all right. I have you. I’ll always have you. And I’m paying attention, too.”

“I can be good, you know,” he hiccupped. “I can be really good.”

“You’re already good, Clint. I promise.”

***

They were playing the hand and knife game, when it happened. Clint had his hand spread out wide, palm down on the table in front of him, and Natasha was bouncing the tip of her knife between his fingers, lightening fast. It was mostly muscle memory, since the knife itself was a blur with the speed of it all.

Clint had seemed tense at first, although he still hadn’t hesitated when she’d ordered him to lay his hand out, but he seemed bored now that it had gone on a few minutes. Or, maybe bored was the wrong word. He wasn’t watching the knife and his hand anymore, but was instead staring at her face. More specifically, she realized, he was staring at her mouth.

She stopped with the knife, poising it above his actual hand like a threat, but he didn’t even seem to notice. Maybe he just didn’t believe she’d do it.

“Are you paying attention to me?” she asked.

But that was all she had time to say. He stood up suddenly, reaching out toward her and she almost sliced at his hand with the knife because the possibility that he was attacking her broke into her consciousness with a raw and vicious roar. But the posture was wrong, and the look in his eye was wrong, and it was all a little bit wrong.

So she trusted him. For just one single split-second she trusted him more than she trusted the instincts of her own body, and that pulsed shaky adrenaline through her blood more quickly than the fact that Clint was leaning over the table to take her face in his soft hands to draw her in for a kiss.

It wasn’t like their other kisses. They’d had plenty of chaste kisses, and tons of forehead kisses, and a few deeper kisses, but this was more than those. This was possessive and frantic and rough, and she had her fingers in his hair to clutch him toward herself more quickly than she remembered moving.

Clint actually climbed over the table to get to her, and the knife fell out of her hand and onto the floor, forgotten.

“What?” she managed to gasp, as they drew apart to breath for the slightest second.

“You keep saying I’m yours,” he said, right up against her lips. “I guess I just now realized that that makes you mine, too.”

She should have bit him and drawn blood. She should have ended it. She should have slapped him and held him down and punished him for the presumption. The rebellion. The disrespect. But then her back hit the wall, as his intensity drove her backwards, and everything was warm and rough and perfect.

She couldn’t punish him. She’d never punished him for speaking the truth.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, if I haven't earned that "Explicit" rating yet, I certainly have now. I also beat NaNo, but that's besides the point. :P

He did cross the line eventually. In retrospect, he probably should have let her alone for a while, after such a dominate move as that kiss. But he’d always pushed his boundaries, and those who push their boundaries have the nasty habit of finding them.

Clint found them at four o’clock in the morning, when he woke up on the floor next to her bed. Natasha’s alarm wasn’t set to go off for another forty minutes, and he apparently got it in his head that she’d welcome him between her sheets. Even though she’d very specifically put him on the floor for the night.

When he cuddled up next to her, she startled violently, and shoved him hard with one palm to his chest. He fell out of the bed in an undignified pile and with a squeak that would have been amusing in any other circumstance.

He seemed to realize he’d fucked up the moment she’d pushed him, and he scooted back a few feet along the floor. He winced, suspicions confirmed, when she threw the covers off herself with far more force than necessary.

“You want to tell me what that was?” she snapped, swinging her legs off the side so she could sit on the edge of the bed.

“Sorry,” he said, already ready to cry. “I wanted up there with you.”

Natasha sighed and rubbed her temples, trying to shake off the panic she’d felt at the feeling of someone else’s skin against her own, raising her from sleep.

“Look,” she said. “Sometimes when I make you sleep on the floor, it’s for fun. Because I want you there. And sometimes it’s because I _need_ you there. Because I…” She struggled for the words, unsure how to proceed, and slightly surprised at herself for attempting the revelation in the first place.

Clint noticed she wasn’t completely angry anymore, and inched closer again.

“Can I put my head on your knee?” he asked.

She nodded silently, and then carded her fingers through his hair when he did so. She grounded herself in the now-familiar motion.

“Sometimes I can’t sleep with people touching me,” she admitted. It was easier when he wasn’t looking right at her. “Sometimes it scares me.” If he was hers, then this wasn’t admitting a weakness to an enemy. “Sometimes it terrifies me.” It was admitting a weakness to herself, and that was good. That was a way of overcoming it. “Sometimes I can’t stand the touch of another person against my skin while I’m sleeping, because then I wake up and all I can remember is all the times it hurt so much to be next to someone else in a bed. When I was young and stupidly naïve.”

Clint was rubbing circles on her ankle with his thumb, in such an obvious attempt at comfort that the rest of the story came spilling out.

“I fucked up in Belgrade. Supposed to sleep with a target, get the info, and leave in the morning. I got the information. I didn’t fuck up that part. But I felt that urge coming on, and I let myself fall asleep in that bed with him anyway. And when I woke up, a few minutes later, when his skin brushed against mine? I startled awake and snapped his neck so fast. So quickly. It was over before I realized what I was doing. I’m lucky I’d already gotten the information, or I would have been in more trouble than I was. Still, I ended up grounded here at the base, on some pretty intense probation.”

She tightened her grip in his hair.

“And that’s when they gave me you. So when I tell you not to sleep in the bed with me…”

She twisted Clint’s head by his hair, jerking his face away from her knees and forcing him to look up at her. He licked his lips nervously, trying to read her face.

“…then you will do as I say. Because I swear to god, Clint. If I wake up and found I’ve snapped your neck I will loose my goddamn mind.”

“Yeah?” he breathed, smile twitching at his lips even and he trembled beneath her in fear. “Nice to know I’ve made an impression. You gonna punish me now, or no?”

“I am definitely going to punish you.”

“How do you want me?”

God, that question. He sent shivers and warmth through her all at once.

“Stand by the edge of the bed and bend over to put your hands down on it. Drop your sweatpants. And whatever you might or might not have on underneath.”

He complied quickly, already resolved to whatever punishment she might chose to inflict. A decision which Natasha mused over for a moment. She immediately dismissed most of the items she’d used in the cell, since she didn’t want to associate the two places, but she did want to use an implement, and preferably one she had at hand.

In the end, she chose the tawse she’d picked out a few weeks back, in preparation for just such an event. She wanted the punishment to be memorable, after all. Although she had no intention of bringing it to the level of torture.

“Why are we here?” she asked.

Clint muttered “fuck” underneath his breath with such vehemence that Natasha had to stifle a laugh as she realized he thought they were playing the same game they’d played after he’d lied to her.

_Why are we here? I lied. Why are we here? I lied. Why are we here? I lied._

“Not like that,” she reassured him. “I’m sorry. I should have watched my wording more carefully. I meant, tell me what you did.”

“I disobeyed. You said to sleep on the floor, and I crawled into the bed.”

“Do you understand why I gave that order?”

“Yes.”

“Give me more than that, Clint.”

He paused then, obviously considering the name she’d used. She thrown it out on purpose because, just as she’d abandoned the whip and the cane, she was abandoning the rules of the sessions. This wasn’t his cell anymore. This wasn’t his breaking.

“This isn’t a session,” she reminded him. “This is just us, preventing a disaster between us. I just want to make sure you understand what you did and that you won’t do it again.”

“I disobeyed,” Clint repeated. “You were trying to protect me, and I presumed to determine when your order came to an end. It was dangerous and stupid.”

“Any questions? Anything you don’t understand about why you’re about to be punished?”

“No, I…I get it.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot though, and Natasha waited patiently for him to find his voice. Sure enough, he then added, “I’m sorry. Like, for real. It’s just important to me that you know that.”

“Oh, Clint,” she breathed, stepping forward to place a hand on his lower back. “I know. This will be quick, and then it will be over. Ready?”

“Yeah.”

She began after that, determined to make her point quickly by putting considerable strength behind each blow. He started out taking them well, as she laid a series of stripes into his skin, but quickly degenerated. More quickly than she’d expected, for someone who had become familiar with pain, even before her. It was when he began flinching violently at every blow, at one point putting one knee up on the bed as if to climb away from her, that she became concerned.

“You still here with me?” she asked cautiously.

“I need you to talk to me, please. It makes it…so I…it makes it so I can breath.”

She considered the request, and how hard he was gasping, and compromised.

“You talk to me instead,” she ordered. “Count for me. Do you know what number you’re on?”

“No. Fuck, sorry. No clue.”

“That was fourteen. Now is fifteen.”

The number seemed to help. She didn’t know whether it was because he really did need that communication between them or if he just needed something focus on besides the pain, but the simple tactic got them through the rest of the punishment. When she tossed the tawse onto the bed next to his hands he jumped slightly, but seemed in control of his senses.

“Go put it away,” she told him. “Bottom dresser drawer.”

He stood up slowly, bringing the strip of leather up with him, and then turned to walk to the indicated dresser. Natasha waited until he’d turned his back to wring out her hand from where she’d clutched the handle tightly. It had been a new implement for her, and she’d probably gone overboard on her grip in a desire to control it. Still, no harm done.

She settled herself on the bed, and – when Clint turned back around from where he had pushed the drawer shut – she gestured him over to her. To her semi-surprise, he didn’t come and join her on the bed, but instead kneeled at her feet, resting his chin on the top of her knee again, looking up at her through eyelashes that were just too long to be fair.

“Comfortable?” she asked mockingly.

“Well, my ass smarts,” he said. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“Of course not. The only reason I could think of for your ass to smart is if you’d been bad. And everyone here knows you’re always good. Nothing but perfect for me.”

“Yeah well, I don’t know about that,” he said, snorting softly. “I try, but it’s a work in progress.”

“No,” she corrected, bending down to kiss the top of his head. “You’re always perfect. Even when you mess up. Even now, red-assed and sweaty. Perfect, perfect, perfect.” She punctuated each “perfect” with a kiss on either eye, and then one on his nose.

“You say that now,” Clint began, but she cut him off.

“I say that always.”

***

She was studying the folders for her upcoming mission, trying to find so much as a single weak spot in the building she was preparing to infiltrate, when he knocked on their door. She was confused, at first, because knocks usually came on the outside door, but she realized quickly it was Clint, from his room.

“Come in?” she asked, amusement in her voice.

Clint stuck his head into the room, and she could see through the half-open door that he was holding one of the books she’d given him, with his finger stuck in-between the pages to mark his place.

“I know you’re busy,” he began. “But I was wondering if I could come in here and read with you? I’ll be really quiet. You won’t even know I’m there.”

She nodded with her head, to indicate to him to come in, and he hurried into the room like a praised puppy. He didn’t take long to settle next to her, and the smile on his face was difficult to miss.

She was sitting on the floor, with multiple files all spread out around her, but he managed to find space to lie on his back next to her.

“Your arms are going to get tired,” she pointed out, as he held the book up in the air in front of his face.

“It’s good practice,” he said. “Gotta get my arms back somehow. We’re not spending nearly enough time at the gym.”

“That’s because I have a real job,” she mused. “But you could go on your own, if you want. You’re hardly a prisoner here, these days.”

“I don’t know,” he deflected. “With what happened last time I went out alone, maybe it’s best if I just hang around here for now. At least until I prove I’m useful.”

She didn’t argue with him, since she probably didn’t have much of a leg to stand on against his point, but she did make a mental note to get the two of them to the gym more often. It wasn’t like longer workouts would hurt her either, and she’d make sure he didn’t take it too far.

“See how long you can hold the book up there,” she challenged. “Tell you what. I’ve got a time in mind. If you can beat it, I’ll give you a kiss.”

“And if I can’t? Then what? Cigarette burns?”

The way he said it left a sour taste in her mouth and a sinking feeling in her stomach, but she forced herself to answer cheerfully, “I think that ‘no kiss’ is punishment enough, don’t you?”

***

It was only a matter of time before Clint pinned her. It had been a miscalculation on her part, an assumption that he wouldn’t risk reinjuring his body in order to get a win on her. She should have known better. The stupid boy was lucky he hadn’t done permanent damage to that shoulder, with the way he’d used it to compensate for his waned strength.

Still, there was something heady in the way her back hit the mat with his fingers around her throat. She couldn’t help but wonder what the outcome would have been if this had been how they’d first met. Not here, of course, but out here somewhere on the field. What if she’d been the first one brought to her knees?

It didn’t really matter, but it was an interesting thought. Then he let go of her neck almost as quickly as he’d grabbed it.

“Proud of me?” he asked. Checking to see if she was mad at him or not.

“Very proud,” she answer, which did more than enough to distract him while she got her foot position behind his ankle and prepared to flip their positions.

***

She had to leave on her first mission since he’d been released, and he tried impressively hard to convince her to let him come. But as much as she trusted him around the base, no one trusted him out there in open air. So she shook her head firmly and, when he kept asking, put him on the floor in a plank position and told him he’d better not move till she told him to.

She didn’t have any intention of ever telling him to move, and he held out an impressive fourteen minutes before his shaking muscles gave out and his face hit the concrete.

“You’re almost back to your old self,” she praised him. But then she whipped his ass anyway.

***

She finally decided to give him a PT test. He’d been sure-footed and almost evenly-matched with her for days. She’d even gotten him cleared to work at the firing range, even if he did call their selection of archery equipment “an insult to mankind.” So, all in all, she had every indication that he would do very well. Which is why she pursed her lips in displeasure at the marks she’d received in the email.

“What the fuck?” she snapped, turning in her chair to look at Clint. He was balanced on his hands in some part-yoga part-circus move, but when he heard the anger in her voice his head shot up, unbalancing him. He wobbled, then hit the deck, although he still somehow managed to make it look graceful as he rolled up into a kneeling position.

Yeah. He should have done just fine on the physical exam.

“You want to explain this to me?” she snapped, gesturing at her computer. “I mean, I guess I should at least feel grateful that you didn’t think I was stupid enough to believe a failed marksmanship portion. So _congrats_ , you passed that one, at least. The rest of these, though? Fucking hell, Clint.”

Clint scrambled to his feet, and shrugged his shoulders. Which was not what she’d been expecting. Fear, maybe. At least an apology. She decided on a different approach.

“Why did you fail the exam, love? What happened?”

He shrugged again, but he had that look on his face that meant he wanted to pace around the room. That he had some kind of excess energy underneath his skin.

“I don’t know what you thought I’d do,” he spoke quickly. “I mean, clearly I can’t pass. Not if we want to keep this. I can’t just…what? Go out on missions with you? Kill the people _they_ tell me to kill?”

“You’ll kill the people _I_ tell you to kill,” she interrupted him sharply.

“For how long?” he shouted back. “How long do you really think it will be before I qualify for their fucked up version of events? How long before I’m in a perch, bow drawn to my ear, sighting a target I might have protected in another life, and you’re not there? How long before they put me on a mission without you? What do you think happens then?”

“I won’t let you go on a solo mission – or a mission with a different team – until I know you’re ready,” she said through her teeth.

“Because you make all the calls?” he accused. “Because that’s your decision to make? You had to ask permission for every single step of my training. What makes you think they’ll let you decide when and what I go out for? You don’t even have a say in your own missions.”

He was right. She hated that he was right, but it was the dark fear in her rising daily anxiety. They could pull the rug out from under her at any moment, and it was more and more likely to happen the more freedom Clint was earning. It was only a matter of time before he was put to a test she didn’t give him. Sooner or later, they’d find out she hadn’t trained Clint to be loyal to them. Just to her.

They’d both pay for that.

“It’s better just to put it off,” Clint said. “Delay it as much as possible, while we try and figure this out.”

She rose with a surge of fury and slapped him backhanded. Hard enough to take him to the ground. His outstretched hand hit the floor in a last minute attempt to break his fall, but he hadn’t been expecting the force behind her blow, and it didn’t help much. His knee then hip then chest hit the ground in a rolled line, and then he was crumpled on the ground.

She took him by the arm and jerked him hard, moving his upper body so he was completely on his back and she could straddle his stomach. Then she slapped his face, waited until he’d recovered and turned his head back forward, and then she slapped him again.

“You don’t make the decisions,” she hissed. “You don’t ‘figure things out’ with me. I make the decision, and then you follow through. If I want you to take the fitness exam, then you throw everything you have at the fitness exam. If I tell you to do stare at the wall without blinking, then you will let your eyes burn. If I tell you to eat syrniki and smetana until you throw up, then what are you going to do?”

“I’m gonna throw up a fuck ton of syr--searn--sirnick and smit--schmidt--fuck. I’m gonna throw up a fuck ton of food.” He paused, and then added, “That’s food, right?”

If he would stop being adorable for ten seconds maybe she could actually be harsh enough to get a point through his goddamn head.

“Yes, it’s food,” she said, softly slapping his face again, without any force at all. More a brush of her fingers against the reddening marks. “You have to trust me to make the decisions, Clint.”

He rolled his eyes and huffed, sending another flare of anger through her, just when she’d been calming down.

“Something you want to say, boy?” she snapped.

“You want to make decisions?” he snapped back. “So decide!”

That threw her for a loop, and she paused momentarily, in her fury, trying to figure out what he meant. Somehow, she didn’t think he was still talking about the pending disaster of when he finally got put on the mission roster.

“Fucking decide,” he yelled again, this time shoving up at her with open palms, almost unseating her. When she still didn’t respond, narrowing her eyes as she tried to figure out what he was talking about, he cursed in exasperation and bucked his hips.

“Do you want me or not?” he shouted. “You keep touching and promising and teasing, but you never do it!”

Oh.

_Oh._

Shit.

She had to tighten every muscle to suppress the full-body shiver that threatened to rack her. And, just like that, the tension between them shifted. He sensed it as quickly as it happened, and made a slight grunting noise in surprise.

“If you want something,” Natasha hissed, “then you have to ask for it. I didn’t spend months and months teaching you manners, just to sit here and listen to you get all pissed off because you can’t have something you didn’t even _ask for_.”

“Fuck me,” Clint said. “Please fuck me. Fuck me however you want. Fuck me, peg me, ride me, sit on my fucking face for all I give a shit, just do something. Do _anything_.”

“Hmmm, now would you believe that I actually don’t have anything to peg you with easily on hand?”

“No, I would not,” Clint said forcefully, and that made her laugh. It made her feel giddy and light, and that brought her crashing back down as she remembered the last time she’d felt like this.

So she leaned down face to face with Clint and asked, “Why do you want me to fuck you?”

“Why?” he echoed, incredulity in his voice. “Why do I…” He spluttered, momentarily overwhelmed, and then threw his head back against the floor, hard enough that it bounced. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Why do you I want you to fuck me?” he echoed again. “God, Natasha, because _I want you to fuck me_! What the hell? Make it good or make it hurt, I don’t care. I need to _feel_ you.”

It was more than enough for her. The giddy rush of uncontrollable emotions was back, and all the stronger for its momentary repression. Her hands were literally shaking as she considered him underneath her.

“Strip,” Natasha ordered, because her voice was barely complying. If she touched him he’d feel her trembling. “Start with your shirt.”

The shirt was the easy part – she wasn’t sitting on it – and he managed it with a half sit-up and a frantic flailing motion. When he’d managed to peel it free, he flung it across the room, spread his arms out on the floor, and panted up at her.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Shut up.”

She was looking at him. Really looking at him. Heaven knows she’d mapped his body with her eyes before, but that had been to calculate pain and damage. This was different. There weren’t so many new scars on his chest. Just the few from the electricity, a knife wound, and a couple bullet holes that hadn’t been her responsibility.

She started off with kissing the long-healed bullet holes. Gentle kisses, quick and chaste, as a tribute to a bygone age. Then she moved on to the knife wound that she’d given him. For that, she did more than just press her lips to it. That got open mouthed kisses that left the taste of his skin in her mouth.

She had her hands on the floor on either side of his chest, but she moved them up to rub slow circles along his ribs with her thumbs. He twitched underneath her, and let out a breathy laugh.

“Tickles,” he explained.

“Sensitive much?” she murmured. “Then how about this?”

She kissed the healed electrical scars, but used her hands at the same time to rub her thumbs over his nipples. His breath caught each time the circles brought the pad of her finger over the hardened bud, and he quickly began shrinking back – almost imperceptibly – every time she came around again.

“Rude,” she said, moving up to nip at his shoulder.

She saw the burn scars then, mostly healed but still nasty looking, and she readjusted her stance to get her mouth at them.

“You know,” she said, after kissing the first one, “these are my favorite marks on you.” She moved her attention to the second one, dragging her tongue over it first, before she kissed it messily. She was trying to keep up the friction against his nipples, but she was missing more often than not, with the not-looking and the awkward position. She moved onto the third burn.

“Not mine,” he said carefully.

“I supposed you weren’t having much fun at the time. One day I’ll get you all wound up and describe what you looked like when I gave them to you. See if I can get you to see the situation from my perspective. Especially the later ones.” She moved to the mentioned twin set of scars. “You were soaking wet, bent over your arm so carefully, but you came back fighting every time I started that timer again. You didn’t give up for even one moment.”

“Still not a fan of them,” Clint persisted.

“No? How about this then? What are you thinking of, as I run my fingers over your arm right now. As I kiss these places?”

“I’m thinking of you, holding me down while I scream.”

“You’re thinking of me?”

“Yes.”

“Not your father?”

Clint didn’t have an answer for that. He just blinked once, staring up at the ceiling.

“He burned you on these places too, you know,” Natasha continued. “Most of them, anyway. But when you think of them, you think of me. That seems like a cleansing to me. A re-writing.”

“A re-branding.”

“Exactly. Like some literary metaphor for your new becoming, wrought under my fingers.”

“Still not sure I like you bringing up my father right now. Hard to get it up when you’re thinking about your parents.”

Natasha laughed, and obligingly lifted her center of gravity, so she could slap his belt buckle – terrifyingly close to the outline of his hardening dick against the restraining fabric – and ordered, “Get them off.”

He obliged, while she mirrored the action for her own clothing. Although, she left her underwear on, while Clint had none to remove.

“Really?” she smirked.

He was too busy dragging his eyes all over her underwear to notice the jab. Never one to miss out on that kind of attention, she ditched her shirt as well, warming under his gaze. It was almost laughable, as she felt her own arousal build, that she’d ever been confused by how easy her targets were to turn on.

Apparently, all it took was to really want something.

And having it make little panting noises underneath your slightest touch certainly didn’t hinder the sensation.

His eyes didn’t appear to know where to look, bouncing back and forth between where her breasts were held within her bra and where the thin fabric of her underwear hid the promise of a slightly sweeter treat.

She was running her fingers horizontally along the tops of his thighs, tracing the thin knife marks she’d left there during his last hours in the cell. Those had been some of the last wounds she’d inflicted, and they were the thinnest and most shallow scars. He’d been so sensitive and strung out by then, that anything she did was simply a matter of prolonging the pain. Those scars would probably heal into invisibility within the year. They were already easy to miss beneath her trailing fingers.

She rose up again, knees planted on either side of his hips, so her body hovered just above his, splayed thighs making Clint grow to hate the strip of fabric separating his eyes from his prize.

“You know,” she said conversationally. “Last time you had me naked, you didn’t seem so eager to take advantage.”

“Didn’t know what I had,” Clint panted. “Stupid.”

“Oh? And what’s changed now?”

He moved his hands from where he’d had them clasped in fists at his thighs, and gently took her hips in his hands, drawing her attention down to his face. When he spoke, he spoke with more sincerity than she’d been expecting, breaking through her control of the moment.

“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t know what I had. Now I do.”

Like it was just that simple. Tears pricked at the back of her eyes, and then they were spilling down her cheeks, and she knew, she _knew_ , he’d never use it against her.

She grasped his left wrist and drew it forward to the side of the black underwear, and he took the hint with reckless abandon. He wiggled his fingers between the elastic and her skin, pushing forward until his hand was almost completely hidden behind the fabric. He had to twist his hand a little, and she smirked down at him.

“Give me a minute,” he griped. “The angle’s all wrong. I’ll get it.”

And he certainly got it, slipping his finger around to rub at her clit. She was already wet enough that dry friction wasn’t a problem, but he still seemed to automatically know exactly how hard to press to get a sensation but how light to keep it to avoid overpowering the nerves and bypassing the cluster altogether.

“What the fuck?” she breathed, as the hot-cold circle of sensation grew. She could hear the obscene sound of his other fingers as he twisted his hand even further to push his fingers into her.

“Told you I just needed a minute,” he crowed.

“Getting your calluses back already, I see,” she panted.

He tightened the grip of his other hand on her waist, and he used it to guide her to begin rocking back and forth, grinding into him. He’d readjusted his hand to allow her to rock against his unyielding palm, and she began rolling her hips involuntarily.

“Let me get my tongue in there,” he whispered, brushing his fingers over her opening.

“I’ve got a better idea.”

She shifted her weight again, this time to drag her underwear down one leg and unhook it from one foot. She left it looped around her other thigh, but pushed it to the side so it slid down to pool on the floor at her knee.

Then she took adjusted his dick with one hand, braced herself against his chest with the other, and slowly sank down onto him. The pressure was sudden and insatiable, filling and pushing against the whole of her. Clint was murmuring a string of words that were mostly unintelligible, although she was pretty certain she caught the word “fuck” at least a few times.

“That’s the idea,” she laughed. “Just give me a minute.”

She didn’t even need the whole minute, already acclimatized to the feel of him inside her while her own warmth loosened and slicked her. But she was having fun, watching him underneath her, and moving immediately would have given him more relief than she was willing to give him right off the bat.

However, she couldn’t take it forever either, and she eventually began to ride him. Up and down, up and down. She kept the pace changing to suit her every whim, simultaneously going out of her way to keep him hanging, clenching at the wrong moments and relaxing just when he started to tremble on the brink of his orgasm.

Her own took her by surprise. Or, rather, it didn’t surprise her how much it took her for surprise. One moment the heat and the pressure was just building better and better and better and then she opened her mouth and let out a soft sigh while she pulsed around him, hitching her hips against him a few more times.

“Good?” he asked, as soon as she seemed lucid again.

“You want a performance review? Or are you trying to figure out if you get to come?”

“Can it be both?”

She laughed as she climbed off and obligingly took him in her hand.

“I supposed you did earn it,” she sighed, but smiled up at him so her knew she was still having fun. She slid her hand up and down his shaft a few times, and a few times was all it took before he bucked his hips and spurted white and hot along his stomach. She kept pumping, working him through his orgasm and then a little beyond.

“Stop,” he panted, as she began to be painful against his over-sensitized skin.

“Stop what?” she asked innocently.

“Oh _fuck_ Nat please stop!”

She let go with a laugh, not in the mood to ruin the moment, and laid down on his chest again, still straddling him. She scooted up a little more, so she could bury her face in the curve of his neck.

“Maybe I’ll have to actually get a strap on,” she mused, still breathing heavily as she settled into him, already feeling the edge of sleep. It was late, and she wasn’t sure how much more work she could have gotten done that night anyway.

“Wait, you actually really don’t have one?” Clint gaped. “I thought you had all manner of pain-causing devices at your fingertips.”

“I didn’t say I don’t have anything that could go up your ass. I said I don’t have a strap on.”

“I’m terrified.”

“You should be. But honestly, I think I’m more likely to put you on top, next time. You wouldn’t let it go to your head, would you?”

“No!” he hurried to assure her. “I can keep my head. I can. It would be my honor and my privilege.”

“Your honor and your privilege to what?” she teased.

“It would be my honor and my privilege to fuck you,” he grinned.

“Well, all right then. Though I suspect it will also be your pleasure.


	13. Chapter 13

He was getting bratty.

That was the only word that Natasha could think of to describe Clint’s developing character. What had started out as a life-preserving attempt to understand exactly what made her angry and what didn’t had turned into some kind of game where he toed the line like a tightrope. Maybe he was getting off on the danger – he was certainly getting off with her in a lot of other ways – or maybe he just couldn’t help himself. Ever the addict.

She hadn’t decided how she felt about it. His timid requests for attention and favors had turned into petulant demands accompanied by smirks that made her heartrate jack up. It wasn’t all the time, but it was often enough that she knew he was doing it on purpose.

He also picked the worst moments. Or the best moment, depending on your perspective. Whenever she was strung out and high on him and his piercing eyes.

“Laugh for me,” he urged, rolling his hips to slowly piston himself into her. He laughed gently into her neck, amused at himself and the world around them. “Laugh. Just for me. Because the world is so goddamn funny, and we’re the only ones who can see it.”

She laughed, high pitched and breathy.

She hadn’t meant to.

Weeks passed and she couldn’t ever get herself in the mood to beat the habit out of him.

***

They ran out of time with the heart-pounding immediacy that accompanies all disasters. Like the way you throw on the brakes and your mind has all the time it needs to inform you that there’s no way you’ll come to a stop in time, but physics doesn’t have enough time to save you from the impact.

Natasha re-read the email four times and still couldn’t have told you exactly what it said. She’d finally managed to get the gist of it into her brain, though.

“What’s wrong?” Clint asked, because the set of her shoulders had changed, and if there was anything he was good at these days it was sensing her mood.

“We have a mission,” she told him.

He clambered up from the floor and came to her. He leaned over in front of the computer, placing one hand on the back of her chair and the other on the desk in front of her, scanning through the email quickly.

“Guess they don’t care whether or not you passed your test,” she commented in monotone.

“At least you’re coming, too?” he tried.

“For now.”

The silence stretched thin between them, while they both continued to stare at the screen, willing it to give them an answer for the growing vulnerability of their lives.

“It’s an old SHIELD base,” he said, and her lips parted involuntarily in surprise. She’d read it through four times and she hadn’t caught that. It should have jumped out at her from the screen. It should have been the second thing she’d seen in that wall of damning text.

“Anything there now?” she asked, causing him to look at her strangely.

“It says it’s been abandoned for months,” he said, gesturing at the screen, and she should have seen that, too. “I’ve never even heard of that location. What would they even want with an empty of SHIELD base?”

“To fuck with me,” Natasha answered. “To fuck with you. To fuck around in our lives because there’s no one to stop them and they’re curious.”

“Like you can talk,” Clint snorted, but he didn’t say it with malice.

It cut at her anyway.

***

She got a drug from the lab that would induce nausea, doubled the dose, and spiked Clint’s food with it. She’d calculated the timing perfectly, and he was just beginning to chew on his lip and breath heavily as the plane began to land.

“Air sick?” she asked innocently.

“Not normally,” he answered. “But I don’t know. Something’s definitely off.”

He looked like he was going to say more, but was cut off by his own body when he leaned over and heaved into the grass.

“Oops,” Natasha smirked. “Anyway, we should get going. Gotta reach the computer core.”

Because that was the objective on this mind-fuck of a mission. Get to the central computer room and see if there was anything left on the main hard drive. Anything anywhere, at all. As though SHIELD wasn’t used to moving around. As though they didn’t know how to make their old bases useless to their enemies.

As though the armed men that had arrived with them on the plane were actually there for their protection.

Clint was vomiting profusely, and it wouldn’t be long before he had nothing left in him, but that didn’t stop her from striding casually in through the once-front-door and calling back over her shoulder, “Keep up, Clint. Hate to have to come back there to get you.”

He managed a few stumbling steps, dry heaved, heaved again but with actual vomit, and managed to make it close enough to get his hand on the open door.

“I’m not okay,” he choked out.

“I think you’re fine,” she chirped back, giving him all the information he needed to realize that she definitely knew what was going on with his body, even if he didn’t. He groaned loudly, clearly wanting the noise to convey his annoyance, but it was ruined when he began to retch again.

“Do you think you could keep the noise down?” she smiled sweetly. “I’m trying to make sure there aren’t any left behind traps here. Or, you know, agents on the run and looking for somewhere to hole up.”

She said it before she thought about it, intending it to be a joke, but the very real possibility that there might actually be other SHIELD agents somewhere in the abandoned building knocked the air out of her.

Clint had caught her misstatement, too, because his eyes shot up to meet her face, even as he stayed hunched over.

She didn’t know what her eyes were communicating to him, but it probably didn’t matter, since he just took a stuttered breath and retched yet again. He probably felt horrible. Gods, nausea was easily one of her least favorite feelings. She’d rather take a whipping than spend a few hours feeling like Clint was. No question.

The thought didn’t do much to take her mind off the potential Agents lurking around every corner. Without Clint there, she’d probably be able to convince anyone that she was also a fleeing SHIELD agent. With Clint, it would probably be impossible. Not because he was vomiting profusely behind her, but because they both knew the submission under duress was not the same as submission by choice, and neither of them knew which of those two options Clint was currently participating in.

Fortunately, they reached the basement without any problems, even though she wasn’t sure what to do after that, exactly. No one had been subtle about the fact that this was a test run for their Widow and her newest weapon. The entire concept of this being a “mission” was ludicrous.

“Well, now what?” she snapped, exasperated and on edge, swinging her flashlight around at the piles of dusty electrical equipment, just sitting in the dark.

“Back-up power,” Clint managed, before he vomited again. God, how much liquid did his body have? There was already a mockery of the Hansel and Gretel tableau following their pathway down here from the entrance.

It was moving from pitiable into pathetic, which was really unfair since it was all her fault. He illustrated the “pathetic” point marvelously when he tried to take a step toward her, slipped in his own sick, and only managed to keep from face planting by catching a bundle of electrical wires that did not, miraculously, pull free from the wall.

“There isn’t any back up power,” Natasha stated.

“Override eighteen, change to section forty and do not engage,” Clint said, even if his voice was a little weak.

She was about to ask him what that had meant, when the lights blinked on, and the unmistakable hum of a neglected generator roared into the imposing silence.

“Like you said,” Clint mumbled at the floor. “Sometimes Agents need a place to crash. Protocol eighteen power only lasts about fifteen minutes, though, so--”

That was all he had time for before she pinned him to the wall by his neck, dragging him off to the side to avoid the lack of traction from standing in his puddle.

“Nat,” he gasped. “Not helping the vomiting thing.”

She forced his head to the side as she dry heaved, but it did stay as just that. Dry heaving. She supposed he finally didn’t have anything left, though he did spit snot and bile out onto the floor.

“Do they know?” she hissed at him, tightening his grip around his throat as he already struggled to gasp for air, starting with a deficit.

“Know what?!” he managed to cry out.

“That you’re here? Was that your code? Did you just let them _fucking_ know that you’re here?”

“Oh god,” Clint gaped, and she shook him hard, bringing him forward and slamming him into the wall, cracking his head against the unforgiving metal. He coughed and dry-heaved again, still only coming up with bile.

“Please stop,” he panted. “No one knows. It’s not that kind of code!”

She loosened her grip on his neck, and then let him go completely as he began coughing roughly, interrupted by several bouts of post-tussive retching.

“Explain,” she snapped, narrowing her eyes.

“It’s just a generic code,” he rasped. “It’ll send a signal, but they’re not going to be here for hours. You said we were leaving in fifteen minutes. I didn’t think it’d be a problem. No one knows I’m alive, I swear.”

It was the hurt in his eyes that made her believe him. She reached out and touched his shoulder, either as an apology or as forgiveness, neither of them knew. Clint responded by bending over and gagging.

“When is this going to stop?” he whined.

“About seven more minutes,” said Natasha, flipping on the screen nearest her to check for any files. As she’d suspected, there wasn’t even a real operating system. Just a single set program to contact another location. Which Natasha did _not_ intend to do.

“Seven minutes in hell,” Clint muttered dryly, and then groaned and lightly banged his head against the wall. She watched him while he glanced up and looked straight at the embossed SHIELD logo un-subtly pasted upon the plaster wall across from him. His eyes had just enough time to focus on it before he leaned over, and tried to vomit again.

Perfect timing.

“Let’s go,” Natasha said, all efficiency now that they everything was slightly calmer. If another Agent had been hiding here, they would have already enacted protocol eighteen to call for help, or to check in.

She took Clint by the wrist, almost making him slip again as she dragged him from the room. She nodded briefly at their security guards who were waiting for them outside and said, “We’re good, but we might want to leave before someone else shows up. Had to turn the power back on. Barton says we have another fifteen-ish minutes to be in the air.”

“Where’s the fire? We’ve got six times that, easy,” Clint murmured just to her as the board the plane again. At least he’d stopped dry-heaving.

“I want to go home,” she stated simply.

“Yeah?” he asked, snuggling up against her. “Me, too.”

He smiled when he said it though, so she could only pray he was talking about their home together, and not the patterned halls of SHIELD.

***

“My stomach still hurts,” he whined at her. He was lying on his back on the bed, buck-ass naked, and trailing his fingers in large circles on his stomach.

And complaining.

Endless. Complaining.

The drugs had caused his stomach to cramp. His electrolytes would be off balance “forever.” He didn’t want to write up a mission report, plus that hadn’t even been a real mission. His first time outside in almost a year and she’d made him vomit all the way through it. He could still smell it. He could still taste it. She was so mean to him.

He finally seemed to run out of things to complain about the mission but, just as Natasha inwardly sighed with relief, he said, “And what’s up with this room, anyway? It’s like a cave. Why aren’t there more lights?”

And just – no. If he was about to start complaining about everything in general, then she was drawing the line right there. The brat could learn to shut his mouth the hard way. Whining, ungrateful, button-pushing, selfish _child._

She stood up from her desk with a quick spin to face herself in Clint’s direction, and found herself brought up short. She’d thought he was still on the bed, trying to tempt her into fucking him, but he’d moved. He was standing right in front of her – what had been _right_ behind her – and he was holding a quirt. He had his arms outstretched and his palms up, with the implement lying across both hands.

She hadn’t heard him move. She hadn’t heard him open the drawer and fetch the whip. She hadn’t heard anything except the incessant droning of his voice, which _should_ have made it obvious that he was moving, but it hadn’t.

“Punish me?” he asked, dipping his head just so he could look up at her through his lashes.

Punish me. They were the words in his mouth, but not the words he was saying. Natasha could hear the actual message hiding in his closed-lip smile.

_I know exactly where your buttons are. I know exactly how far I can push. I know exactly when you’ll go over the edge. I might be in the palm of your hand, but don’t forget. I can put you in mine, too._

“Please?” he tagged on, and the anger that surged through her was only matched by the sudden deepening despair.

She did whip him. The quirt wasn’t nearly as nasty as the single-tail they’d first come to understand each other over, but she didn’t hold back. She made him face the wall with his palms carefully placed on the smooth surface in front of him, and she took her anger out on his skin.

His noises started as little breaths, moved into sharp hisses, devolved into little whimpers, and then he was all plaintive cries. He moved his hands so his forearms rested on the wall and he could bury his face in them as his back muscles twitched under the onslaught.

She whipped him raw. Whipped him until the mass of short red lines, a few of them dripping thick blood, extended in a sheet from his shoulders down to his thighs. Whipped until she realized there were tears in her eyes and none in his.

She made him take the quirt in trembling hands and return it to the drawer before she sent him into not-his room to lie on not-his mattress. He did sniffle a little, as he went, cluing her in to the fact that, even if he hadn’t been crying, he’d been close.

It didn’t help.

She’d retaliated against his insurrection more harshly than he’d probably anticipated, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that it had still been worth it to him.

***

They made them do it again. Another not-a-mission to another no-longer-a-SHIELD-base, just to see how he behaved. She thought to herself that they’d have more luck figuring him out if they’d just fly the two of them to New York and dropped him in the middle of Times Square. That would answer everyone’s questions about his fucking loyalty. Not that she made this suggestion outloud.

This time, their “mission” was to get a walking blueprint of an old base, and this time they didn’t have any “guards” with them. Just him and her in a two-person Bird she was piloting. So maybe, actually, this was a test for her just as much as it was for him. Either way, she was determined that neither of them would fail.

Blueprinting was easy, anyway. Just walk the halls and pay attention. Map the numbers when they got back to the plane. Maybe ask Clint if she was missing anything while they were there. Temporary SHIELD bases tended to have the same foundational structure.

She handed him the nausea pill, this time, instead of hiding it in his food. He glanced up at her in surprised when he saw it, and then seemed to realize what it was.

“Please don’t make me take that,” he begged.

“Put it in your mouth and swallow it,” she ordered without taking her eyes off the navigation. No compromise. She knew his back and ass had to be on fire where he was pressed against the copilot seat, but he hadn’t complained about it once. She wouldn’t let him complain about this, either.

“Aversion therapy, huh?” he commented, obediently taking and swallowing the pill.

“More just my way of punishing you for thinking about your old life, since I know it’s inevitable here. I want even your thoughts of this place to be filled with me. Selfishness, more than aversion therapy.”

“Lucky me.”

When they landed, she had the same heart-stopping fear that they’d run into Agents hiding within the base, even though she had to admit to herself that the statistical probability was incredibly minuscule. Still, she was relieved when the lights surged on at Clint’s voice command.

“It’d say make it quick,” she commented dryly, stepping out of the way as Clint vomited again. “But maybe it’s best if you just stay here and…suffer.”

Clint gave her a thumbs up from where he was resting his weight on his knees, hunched over himself again, and she couldn’t help but laugh a little.

She made it a couple steps before it hit her, full force, that she was about to leave him standing there. Alone, in the mountains. She’d spent so much time being exasperated at her superior’s methods, that it hadn’t consciously occurred to her that this was it.

“Don’t…go anywhere,” she said, in-between his heaving.

“Like this?” he coughed. “Nah. I’m staying here.”

The sentence carried so much weight, even with the way he tried to say it casually, but it still didn’t help her fear as she nodded once, and turned to walk down the hallway.

He was on com, anyway. And vomiting. How far could he really get, if he decided to run? Although, if he did run and she did get him back, their real problems would only just be beginning.

She pushed the thought down, and walked away.

For the next fifteen minutes, she listened to Clint retch over the com while she did a quick-walk of the base, mapping it in her head. Fortunately, no one in charge had actually wanted blueprints, so she didn’t need to measure ceiling height and ventilation width. She just needed to do enough to prove they’d landed, spent some time here, and paid attention to the “mission” at hand, all without Clint making a break for the hills.

Clint had long ago stopped retching, and they were casually discussing SHIELD’s color scheme over the coms, when she heard it. The low hum of approaching machinery, in flight and barreling quickly toward them. Natasha took a half-step in the direction she’d been walking a moment before, stuttered to a stop, and then tried another half-step.

The noise was trying to communicate something to her. There was something important hidden in the sound of the approaching engine, but she didn’t want to look at it, because there was something there, underneath the bare data of the noise.

Clint’s voice interrupted her desperate bid to close her eyes and ears against the approaching truth.

“Natasha,” he said quietly. Then, when she didn’t respond, “Nat?”

“Don’t,” she whispered. Maybe if he didn’t say it…

“I lied. Sorry. Or, not sorry, I guess. You did tell me, very specifically, that the rule about no lying didn’t extend beyond that cell.”

“That was for _me_ ,” she accused harshly.

“You didn’t really specify that,” he apologized. Because that was what that tone of voice was. An apology.

“What did you lie about?” she asked, still standing still, in the middle of the hallway. “Was that code specific to you, after all?” Her throat was so thick that it was difficult to get the words out.

“No,” he said. “That’s not it. I lied about how long it would take them to get here. Protocol eighteen is, in and of itself, calling for emergency aid. If you hadn’t gotten us out of there so quickly last time, we would have had this problem then.”

He laughed gently, then continued, “Actually, I was terrified that you knew, after all.”

“I said fifteen minutes,” she recalled. “I told the guards that we had fifteen minutes before SHIELD go there.”

“Turned out that you thought you were lying, but wow. The adrenaline rush you gave me when you said it. I almost couldn’t keep a straight face while we took off. We just flew away from there, when I was a quarter of an hour away from…”

Rescue.

The word hung in the air, but he was just too far on this side of “conditioned” to say it. To conceptualize it.

That broke her. She turned on her heels and started sprinting for the door. The base was almost out of power and she knew the lights would go out on her any minute. She had to get to Barton before then. Barton. Clint. Hawkeye. The shadow that would fold himself away in the darkness and then fade away into SHIELD, leaving her behind as a shaky nameless nightmare.

“Natasha,” he said, as she ran. She’d never moved this fast in her life. She’d never run for something that _she_ wanted before. Always orders from the lips of men who carried the whip, and it turned out that she could move so much faster without the weight of someone else’s expectations.

Why hadn’t she plastered him with tracking devices? Why hadn’t she injected him with every type of signal-generating technology she could have gotten her hands on? Why hadn’t she sewn beacons into his skin, until the only way free from her was to rip away his own flesh?

The answer, of course, was that it would have raised too many questions. She’d barely convinced her superiors to let him be hers for the moment. They would never have allowed even those first steps if she’d let on how tentative her hold on him had been.

She was paying for it now. Paying for her rash headlong rush into the uncontrollable chasm that was Clint Barton.

She shouldn’t have been thinking about it. She shouldn’t have been thinking about her past mistakes, and the problems of the future. How many times had her trainers told her that she had to think about the _present_ , before she could worry about anything else. It was a lesson she’d learned over a decade ago, but when she rounded that final corner, bringing herself into the front entrance hall, she’d forgotten it.

She was moving too quickly to take it back, when she came into view of the four SHIELD agents that had their weapons ready and their hearts pumping with shaky adrenaline. The men had a running list of the faces of SHIELD Agents that might be here. Any and every Agent that could be in front of them at any moment. That was their job; to know whom to shoot and whom not to shoot in these split-second life or death situations.

Clint Barton, they would welcome with open arms.

Her, they shot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my word, is that a cliff hanger?? How RUDE of the author.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "set" the the "spike" of the final chapter, hehe.
> 
> Also, I've discovered the secret formula. If you want people to leave comments on your fics, you just have to torture them with horrible cliff hangers. The answer of the ages has been revealed. :P
> 
> It's like, 3am here. I had no intention of finishing this chapter and posting it today. What even is my life? I have lost all control.

She felt the bullet rip through her lower abdomen, so at least they weren’t shooting to kill. They were giving her that benefit of the doubt. Thinking, maybe, that she didn’t deserve to die.

They were wrong.

That was her last thought before Clint came barreling out of the dark behind the Agents. The one closest turned and saw him. There had to have been eye contact, because they were more than close enough to each other. The Agent _had_ to have seen Clint, because he lowered his gun, clearly recognizing a supposedly-dead fellow Agent.

Maybe they just lived in a world where coming back to life was a natural part of dying. Maybe being dragged back screaming was the only end result of fading away, and it was all just a matter of time.

She hoped no one would drag her back screaming. Not to this life. Not to this world.

_Please_ _Бог_ _. If I have any pull, let Barton tell them to put a bullet through my head. And if I have any pull left after that, please don’t let me hear him say it._

And then Agent Clint Barton took the man by the back of the neck and slammed his head into a pillar. Hard. So fucking hard. The man dropped like a bag of rocks and Clint moved on to the next Agent, repeating the move on him.

By then, the remaining two had gotten that something was wrong, but they didn’t have much time to react. Clint was on them, too. Or, she assumed he was on them. She couldn’t see that far anymore. The pain and the shock and the blood loss had all filtered through her mind. Thinking back, actually, she was pretty sure she’d cracked her head on something sharp when she stumbled and fell after they shot her.

That would explain the blood leaking into her eyes.

Which would, in turn, explain why she couldn’t see.

Or think.

Had Clint attacked his own people?

Had he won?

He must have won, because he was standing over her and swearing at her. Swearing so vehemently. Swearing harder and with more anger than she’d ever seen from him, even in their sessions. Cursing her. Calling her every name he knew in every language he could remember an insult from.

The edges of his face were fuzzy above her. Like an angel of death.

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked. Except, that wasn’t even what the words sounded like to her. They were too garbled. Too nonsensical. There was blood in her mouth.

Everything was nonsense.

She gave up, and let the dark take her.

***

She woke up in a hospital bead. Clean white sheets and clear individual beeps that indicated her heartrate.

“There she is,” a doctor said pleasantly from her left.

“Barton?” she mumbled.

“Here,” he said from her right.

And there he was, just sitting there in a chair by her side. He had his feet up on her bed, lounging back like he’d lived here his entire life. He wasn’t cuffed. He wasn’t under armed guard. He wasn’t smiling either, but then there were a lot of possible reasons for that.

She sent her thoughts out to flit through her memories, trying to find the broken threads to bring the situation together into something resembling coherency.

“I’ve called in Mr. Yemelin to speak with you, Natasha,” the doctor said, forcing Natasha’s attention back to the other side of the room. “He said he wanted to speak with you right away, when you were available, and he’s on his way now.”

Yemelin. That was the man who had given her permission to train Clint. She’d looked him up. And he was coming here, where he’d see her injured and unsettled. It was a horrible impression to give to someone with so much authority.

“Am I okay?” she asked. She could at least maybe get up and get dressed.

“I wouldn’t say ‘ok,’ but you’re not dying. The bullet missed your organs, though it did damage to several arteries. The internal bleeding was the main problem, and we’ve got that all sorted. You should be up and about in a day or so, if you behave very carefully and do _not_ participate in any strenuous activity.

She glanced back at Clint. He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t responded or made a single sound. He was just lounging there, feet on the bed, watching everything with that Hawk-ish gaze. Not her. He wasn’t watching her, specifically. He was watching everything.

She turned back to the room when she heard the footsteps, and then there was Yemelin. She moved to push back the sheets and get to her feet, to at least shown him _some_ modicum of respect, but he mad a _tsk_ ing noise and put up his hands, so she leaned back again obediently.

“We need you to get better,” he said cheerfully. “Get you back on the rotation. You’ve had so much down time lately, whether voluntary or not. But I did want to come down here and personally congratulate you on a job well done with Hawkeye. In record time, too. I have to admit, I didn’t think you could do it, but your boy more than proved his worth yesterday. More than.”

She should feel elated. Praise was rare here. It was even more rare from men like Yemelin. Instead, she felt a cold rush of fear. She didn’t even know what had really happened. She couldn’t separate the hallucination from the reality.

“Unlucky about that SHIELD patrol,” Yemelin continued. “And I can’t say I’m thrilled you got yourself shot, but your Hawk managed to get you out of there _and_ take down four Agents. Saved your life, certainly. There’s probably an irony in that, somewhere.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and nodded solemnly. It made him laugh, as he turned to go.

“Well,” he said in parting. “I don’t recommend you get shot again. Makes for a bad track record.”

When he was gone, Natasha turned back to Clint. He was in the same position, still staring, and she more than knew that – if she asked – he wouldn’t give her any of the answers she was seeking.

It didn’t occur to her till later that, while she was technically bed-ridden for the day, Clint had not been. He could have stood and saluted the man who was technically his superior. But there he’d sat. Silent and defiant. Like always.

She hid from her problems, burying her face in the pillow and willing her body into sleep. Fortunately, its exhausted state was all too happy to comply.

Clint stayed where he was. Keeping guard.

***

She did learn she’d been kept medically sedated for almost two days while her body healed. She learned she’d been an unknowing lab rat for a new type of biosynthetic something-or-other that had ended up working very well, speeding along the healing process. She learned that the entire facility was whispering about the tamed Hawk. She learned that Clint had bitten a man’s hand clean through to the bone when he’d tried to force him away from Natasha’s side.

She didn’t learn any of it from Clint, who kept his silent vigil as though his sealed lips were the only thing guaranteeing his entry into heaven.

She was released a little more than a day after her first full waking, with strict instructions not to do much more than hobble around on short walks.

“You’ll look after her though, right?” the doctor joked to Clint. Clint, predictably, didn’t respond.

“He’s a quiet one,” the doctor stage-whispered to Natasha. “But I get the feeling you’ll be in good hands.”

He had no idea.

Clint did help her to their room, carefully avoiding her quickly healing incision as he took her weight onto himself, but they were still waiting. Waiting for the moment the door would close behind them and something would happen.

As soon as the latch clicked, Clint picked up a pencil from the table and threw it like a dart, piercing the eye of the camera that always watched them. It fritzed and died, and Natasha’s heart rate jack-rabbited as Clint turned on his heel to face her. All the expressions he hadn’t let on his face over the last three or four days were suddenly all there at once.

“I was free!” he screamed. “I was gone! It was over! But then you had to go and fucking get shot, _right there_ in front of me, and I didn’t know what to do.”

Now it was Natasha’s turn not to say anything.

“What were my options?” he spat. “They would have asked me who you were. If I’d told them, they’d have put a bullet in your head, and I would have died. If I had somehow convinced them to leave you, you’d have bled out there alone, and I would have died. If I’d stayed hidden in the shadows, they’d have taken you from me, leaving me alone in the mountains, and I would have died. So much fucking death, over and over and over again.”

He took the collar of the loose shirt she’d put on over her bandages and gripped it in tight fists. The fabric pulled against the back of her neck and god she was frightened.

“So. Much. Death.”

She’d forgotten he was frightening. She’d known he was good. She’d known he was stubborn. Yet, she’d somehow let the memory of his capabilities fade away into memories of waning muscles and bleeding wounds, and now he was frightening her.

He let go, suddenly, looking down at his hands which where white and shaky from how hard he’d been gripping.

“I think I killed that first one,” he said roughly. “I didn’t mean to hit his head against the concrete that hard, and I don’t know if I killed him or not. I got myself under control for the other three, but for that first one…all I could see was your face as you looked at your death and all I could here was your sharp little gasp that followed the gunshot.”

She took his hand in hers and he didn’t pull away.

“Why did you get shot?” he asked, but there wasn’t any anger. “I was free.” There wasn’t any emotion at all.

She drew him back out of the room. The pain in her side was still throbbing and persistent, but she ignored it, walking on her own this time. She led him, holding his hand like it was a collar and leash, and drew him behind her all the way down to what had been his cell, so many months ago.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah…yeah, ok. Um, where do you want me?”

Because he thought this was a session. A punishment. Because he thought she had that in her, right now.

“I need you,” she said, derailing his expectations. “I need you desperately and forever. I got shot, because you gave me the choice between loosing you and dying, and I made my choice. The choices you yourself made after that were not my fault.”

She tugged on his hand again, bringing him closer so she could plant little gentle kisses all over his face.

“I love you,” she admitted. “Я люблю тебя. Te amo. Волим те. Σ'αγαπώ.”

“Why here?” he managed to ask. “Why this room?”

“You know why this room,” she said. “Because I need to tell you that I love you.”

_And there are no lies in this room._

He nodded slowly, their lips brushing each other in the up and down motion.

“I guess I love you, too,” he said. “Didn’t see that one coming.”

“I did,” she confessed. “I made it so there was no other way. I tortured you into loving me.”

Clint laughed.

It was so totally not what she’d expected that she looked up at him quickly.

“You can’t torture someone into loving you, Tasha. You can only make mockeries of the issue. I don’t love you because I want to avoid your whip. I love you because of the stories you told me and the sadness in your eyes. Because the only fairy tales you know are horrible. Because you cried when you realized you loved me first.”

“Stop,” she whispered.

“No. I will never stop. This is my promise to you. Remember, I will never stop. You have been broken already, and now we will remake you.”


	15. Chapter 15

The only question left was, would she be able to leave? Not in a physical sense, as she was fairly certain that the suspicion surrounding her was fairly low, even though she’d so recently gotten herself shot. Slipping away on their next mission wouldn’t be too difficult. So, the physicality of the entire thing wasn’t the issue.

Turned out, knowing you’d been brainwashed into loyalty didn’t help much. Or, at least, it wasn’t helping either her or Clint in any tangible way. Like completely rational adults, they decided to ignore the problem until the date when they were forced to make a decision.

Which happened to be four days later.

“I have a mission,” Clint said, without emotion, looking up from his phone. “I’m supposed to report for a briefing tonight, and I’m heading out right after.”

“When will you be back?” Natasha asked.

“Never. Nat, it says it’s an assassination mission. I’m not going to do it.”

“You’ll do as I tell you,” she replied, on reflex. It was laughable really, as she lay on the bed so her head hung upside down. She was staring at the wall and it wasn’t giving her any answers.

Clint decided to be nice. Instead of contradicting her, he just said, “Well, you won’t be there. You’re still recovering. Besides, they want to find out how I behave when you’re not there. That’s the point.”

“I imagine it’ll be about as well as you behave when I am there.”

“Look. I’ve made my decision, and I’m prepared to back it up. If you want it to go down like this, then that’s how we’ll do it. I’ll refuse my orders on the field, get shot in the head, they’ll give you the report, you’ll do whatever it is that you do, and it’ll be over. You’ll be rid of this all.”

“One shot, Clint. Please? Just do this one mission and then I’ll be assigned to your next mission and then we can go.”

It was kind of nice, having the camera in her room still broken. Speaking freely was nice.

“You know what I’m hearing?” Clint sighed. “I keep hearing the word ‘maybe’. You’re not saying it, but it’s there. _Maybe_ you’ll get assigned to my next mission. _Maybe_ we’ll run. It’s a series of compromises, waiting to happen. I take this one shot, and maybe it’s even someone I’d actually shoot. And then I take the next one, because something else happens. And then maybe I take one more. There are always extenuating circumstances and, before you know it, I’m in it full time. Maybe I’ll have some conditions at first. Like, don’t tell me the details. Or, I don’t kill kids. And then those don’t last forever, either.”

“I’ve killed kids,” Natasha said. It wasn’t in line with the conversation, but it was suddenly overwhelmingly important to her that he know.

“Exactly,” was all he said. “Did you wake up one Monday like, ‘gosh I really want to slaughter a child today’ or no?”

“No.”

“Exactly,” he said again.

Natasha’s phone beeped, and she held it in front of her face, still upside down, to read the message. For one moment she thought maybe she’d been assigned to Clint’s mission after all, but she was just being called in for a non-mission briefing.

“I have to go,” she said. Maybe they’d give her some impossible intel to root around in cyberspace for, and she’d be able to bury her head in her work for a little while.

Because problems totally solve themselves when you refuse to admit they exist.

Disgusted with her self, she rolled to her feet. Clint hadn’t done anything but purse his lips in annoyance at her announcement, but it wasn’t like there was anything he could do about it. She didn’t look back at him as she pushed through the door into the hallway.

She spent the walk mentally stripping away the rawness of her mind and body, preparing and applying the masks that were always necessary for conversations with these kind of men. She was concerned she might not be able to get them on properly, but habit and determination worked wonders, and she felt even her stride changing as she moved purposefully through the corridors.

“You wanted to see me?” she said demurely, as she stood in the doorway.

One of the men gestured to her to sit in an empty chair, and she obeyed quietly.

“Tasha,” the one nearest to her said, as he smiled, speaking with a thick Polish accent. She smiled back, even as she inwardly cursed his assumptive familiarity.

“I have to say,” the man continued. “We are so happy with your work. With the old Agent Clint Barton? Hawkeye was very fast making a serious problem, and now you give us this opportunity.”

The man was obviously having trouble with the English, so when she responded, she spoke in Polish, still smiling.

“I’m so glad to hear that,” she simpered. “My handlers thought it would be good practice for me. I’m so pleased that it has turned out so well.”

The man grinned wildly, gesturing out at his colleagues. “See, how smart she is?” he said, also making the switch to Polish. “Already so impressive. We will be very happy to have you with us for the next few months.”

Which was…what?

She raised one eyebrow carefully, looking over at the only face in the room with which she was familiar. It was one of her old handlers, Kershov. Kershov glanced back and forth between Natasha and the man, and then seemed to realize he was needed. He stepped forward, speaking in English, which had apparently been deemed the only common language among the group.

“Right, Natasha. I assume Mr. Auttenberg has brought up your temporary transfer. We’ll be loaning you out to help them with a specific prisoner, like how you did with Barton. You’ll be there for the next year or so, or however long it ends up taking. Assuming Barton passes his final test tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, he told me he was leaving this evening,” she said. There was a cold dread in her body and, oddly enough, it was flooding her with energy. The last several days of depressed apathy were being burnt away by a freezing fire.

“I assume he’ll be added to a team,” she added. “When he does well tomorrow.”

“We’ve already picked one out,” Kershov nodded. “I think he’ll fit in very well. I hope you won’t miss him too much. I’ve heard a few stories from our security teams that seem to indicate that he has quite a talent with his…hmmm….fingers?”

Natasha laughed gently, as though discussing an unexpected turn in the weather, and said, “Yes, he had a lot of enthusiasm. Although, frankly, not a lot of innovation.”

Everyone laughed.

She imagined ripping their throats out.

Of course they were never going to give him to her. Why the hell would they have done that? How could she ever have assumed that would be something they’d do? She’d thought Clint was a naïve stupid child, but she was sitting pretty on top of that throne.

“Now,” Natasha continued. “Mr. Auttenberg--”

“Please,” he interrupted her, again speaking in Polish. “Call me Marik.” He laid one hand gently on her leg, just above her knee. “We’ll be working together for some time, it seems.”

“Of course,” she smiled warmly, also switching back to Polish. “Marik. Please, tell me a little about this prisoner. I’m very eager to work with someone new. Barton has been getting a little stale, recently.”

She didn’t really listen to the information part of the briefing, from that point onward. She threw all of her energy into not snapping Marik’s fingers as his hand kept returning to her thigh.

 _Yes I get it,_ she hissed inwardly. _You’re coming on to me. I got it. The whole room got it. Now you’re just overselling._

But the nature of time meant that it had to end eventually, and it wasn’t actually that long before Natasha was gathering the offered files and smiling her way out of the room.

When she shoved her way back through the door to her own bedroom, she threw the folders violently onto the bed and slammed the door behind her with all the authority that had somehow been missing from her body over the last week.

“Hey!” she snapped, clicking her fingers twice, smirking in triumph when Clint jumped to his feet as quick as a released bowstring.

God it felt good to know her own mind again.

“We’re leaving,” she informed him.

“I don’t have to go to my briefing for another twenty min--”

“No,” she cut him off. “We’re leaving. You and me. We’re going, without permission or clearance, and we’re not coming back. Put on your fucking shoes and grab your fucking coat. It’s freezing out there.”

***

It was, in fact, freezing, in the most literal sense of the word. A fact that Clint gripped about loudly as soon as they made the open air. The late afternoon sun was a joke, especially with the way the clouds were covering it. Natasha was grateful for the almost-darkness. Clint…not so much.

“Taaasha,” he whined. “Make it stop.”

“Shut the fuck up,” she snapped. “I’m going to try and get us a helicopter. That helicopter, to be specific.”

“They’re not going to notice? I mean, they clearly didn’t notice us getting up on the roof, but I assume that’s because everyone who tries to escape this way turns into a goddamn popsicle before they can even think about getting down somehow. Speaking of which, any plans on getting down?”

“What’s really sad,” Natasha sighed, “is that you’re not even the least grateful rescue I’ve ever done.”

“Does this even count as a rescue?” Clint asked, folding his hands into his armpits. “Seems like some kind of drawn out form of execution to me.”

“I can march you right back in there,” Natasha snapped. “Drop you off at that briefing and leave you on your own to figure your way out.”

“I could do it.”

“Maybe,” she acquiesced. “But during that briefing they told me they were going to put something in your neck that would make disobeying have ‘serious consequences’ which probably means remote detonated poison capsule.”

“An execution device.”

“Clearly. Take this rope.”

“Where the hell did you get rope?” he said, although he did take the offered coils.

“Always have an escape plan for any building you spend a lot of time in. You never know when a regime will change and suddenly your facility is being raided by the enemy.”

“Or when you’ll suddenly realize everyone you work with is a douchey ravioli-faced pignut.”

“That, too,” she agreed. “I mean, I think. Not sure what most of that meant.”

***

Getting down didn’t turn out to be the problem. There was that one guard that didn’t seem to know what to do when he found the Black Widow and whoever-the-hell-that-guy-was belaying down the outside wall of the facility. But then he was face-first in the snow and not a problem anymore.

Time was both their enemy and their friend. They had zero prep time for any planning, but they were also well on their way before anyone could manage to successfully communicate that something was wrong. In fact, Natasha didn’t even have to steal the helicopter. She just waved at Liliya and said it was an emergency.

“I’d say, ‘don’t forget to get me the paperwork afterward’, but I don’t think I’ve ever had to hunt you down for an emergency-use report.”

“You know me,” Natasha smiled. “I always do what I’m told.”

“Be safe,” Lilya said. “Don’t get shot.”

“Yeah,” Natasha answered, watching Clint climb into the pilot’s seat. “You, too.”

All in all, they didn’t end up running up against anyone’s challenge until they were in the air, Clint at the controls and Natasha desperately trying to figure out where to go next. The closest city was only a few minutes by helicopter, but it had so many off-duty personnel there, just a phone call away. However, they couldn’t stay in the air for very long, either. Fighter pilots had to be prepped, but they were more than a match on air speed.

“I think we’re going to have to risk the city,” she was just saying, when the radio crackled.

“Oh, little spider,” the incoming voice sighed. And that was Yemelin, if she wasn’t mistaken. “I see you think we haven’t anticipated this.”

“Fuck you!” Clint shouted at the radio, although he wasn’t pressing the button, so it didn’t really get across. Still, Natasha appreciated the sentiment.

“I don’t believe you,” Natasha said, actually engaging the push-to-talk.

“Natasha,” Yemelin said, admonishing. “We’ve been concerned since your little trip into the mountains, when you came back shot. During your surgery, we implanted an incentive. You know the one. It was brought up during your briefing today, regarding Clint Barton.”

Clint looked at her with sudden alarm, but Natasha shook her head and rolled her eyes. She very much doubted it, and even if it was true, she didn’t care. Let them fill her up with poison and death. She wasn’t going back, hypothetical kill-switch be damned.

“As a close friend just recently said,” Natasha spoke in to the radio. “Fuck you.”

Then she pulled her knife from her boot and shoved it into the radio speaker, wiggling it back and forth until the electronic sparked and died.

“We might have needed that,” Clint said.

“For what? To broadcast our approach? To call for help? It’s short range. It won’t get us in contact with anyone who won’t be reached by them, first.”

“Well, I wasn’t sure whether or not to tell you this,” Clint spoke slowly. “But I have a contact in the city. He’s not SHIELD. He’s just…there. And he owes me a favor. A big one, actually.”

“Wouldn’t have wanted to contact him by radio anyway,” she answered, already changing the filter of the possible plans running through her head. “Can this person get us out of the city?”

“I think it’s really likely. He works on the harbor, and he’s kind of important there.”

“Name?” she asked, heart sinking.

“Yulian. Yulian Bodrov.”

“He’s one of ours,” she sighed. “Heartless bastard. He’ll turn us in in a heartbeat.”

“Did you know he had a daughter?”

That threw her for a loop. She was intimately acquainted with the files of their assets within the near city. You wanted to keep an eye on anyone that close, but she hadn’t had the slightest clue that Bodrov had had a weak point like a daughter.

“No,” she said slowly. “I didn’t know that.”

“She’s cute. Or was, last time I saw her. Smart, too, for a seven year old. She’s in the States. Adopted by a nice suburban family.”

“She’s in the United States?”

“Yeah. Like I said. He owes me a favor.”

***

Bodrov was not happy to see her. Not with the seven messages he’d gotten, offering several rewards for her capture.

He was, however, happy to see Clint. Happy enough to shake his finger in Natasha’s face and tell her “Next time, princess” before smuggling them onto a boat in the dead of night.

***

Natasha didn’t have anything against boats, but my god they were horrible when you were in a small dark space and couldn’t breathe.

She couldn’t even talk to Clint, for fear of being overheard by the rest of the crew, but she did try to satisfy herself by drawing circles on his arm with her thumb. After a few minutes, he started drawing them on her, too.

***

“Sweet land!” Clint cried out, four hours later when they were dumped on shore. “Sweet, sweet land!”

“Stop kissing the dirt,” Natasha ordered. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

***

Passports from a girl Natasha knew in Surgut.

***

Free flight from a third-party company that Clint gave a password to.

***

Weapons and supplies from a cache Natasha had in Moscow.

***

Commercial flight to Hamburg.

***

Bribed pilot for a private jet to London.

***

New clothes and fake wedding rings in a back alley in Glasgow.

***

A train ride to Inverness.

***

A lazy stroll to Clint’s safe-house in Balloch.

***

“The locals are definitely going to notice us,” she said, walking back and forth in the living room of the house.

“Most of them know me,” Clint shrugged. “I come here every now and then, when I think it’s safe. They’ve gotten used to me. I think they’ll be even more understanding with you here. It’s a nice picture, if a little cliché. ‘Rich husband retires away from the world when he meets the love of his life. Moves away and decides to never return to his high pressure job, settling into the Scottish Highlands.’ ”

“Is that what’s happening here?” she asked.

“We’ll see. Let’s just….breathe. God, Natasha. Let’s just breathe.”

***

They breathed.

Clint learned what happens when you try to go swimming in the winters waters of the highlands, but it made the locals laugh.

Natasha made friends quickly enough, especially with her head for languages.

Clint spent his days climbing into the countryside with an empty notebook that he told everyone he was filling with stories and poems. Natasha knew better, because she flipped through the still-blank pages one day.

Natasha spent the days sitting in various windows, or running through the hills. She ran as hard and as far as she could, learning quickly the best routes to take her as far away from people as possible.

On occasion, one of them wouldn’t come home at night. It never unduly worried the other, although they did set up an emergency word and window signal, just in case.

Natasha learned to fish, and the locals laughed at her when she always threw them back.

Clint learned to play Plainy Clappy and became a favorite with the local children.

“You’re such a lovely couple,” Annella told them, as they came back from the market one morning.

Natasha wondered what the woman would say if she responded with, “Well, we are now, but you should see the scars on his back from where I flayed him alive for daring to want to go home. To be free. To get away from the death the follows in my wake.”

Instead, she smiled and said, “Oh my word, thank you so much. You’re so kind.”

That night, she whispered to Clint, “When are you going to leave?”

“And go where?” he asked.

“SHIELD.”

Clint snorted and rolled over, and Natasha didn’t have the courage to be curious about that reaction.

A few nights later, she said, “If you’re not going to go, then at least stay.”

“I am staying. What are you talking about? I’m right here.”

“Exactly,” she said. “You’re right there. Be over here. Please. Be with me. I can’t take living here like this without actually living here like this.”

“You know,” Clint said. “For someone who knows so many languages, you’re kind of shit with words.”

“Like you can talk,” she answered, but the rest of the teasing exchange fell away as Clint slowly ran his hand up her thigh.

“I wasn’t sure you wanted it,” Clint said. “I didn’t know how much everything had been tainted between us.”

“None of it. Or all of it. I don’t know.” It was hard to think with his hand resting on her hip.

“Loquacious,” he teased.

“Shut up. What I mean is that isn’t everything ruined? All things, all the time. Nothing is ever really good or perfect or pure, and that’s only all the more true in our lives. It doesn’t bother me, somehow, how fucked up this is. Maybe fucked up is the only way I could have something like this.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Clint sighed. “But I don’t think I’m going to argue very hard right now.”

Her response was smothered by a kiss, gentle but insistent, and she let her head fall back against the pillow. He tucked his fingers under the elastic of her waistband and murmured, “up.” She lifted her hips obligingly, and he slid the fabric down, reaching deep underneath the sheets to push the garments all the way off. She helped him by pulling her feet free.

Then he did the same with his own pants, leaning back to put the weight on his shoulders so he could slide them over his hips and then down his legs. He pulled them off and dropped them casually on the floor next to their bed.

He turned to her, and wrapped one hand around her knee, pulling her leg to bend and move out to the side, so he could shuffle around on the bed to kneel between her legs. He was stroking himself gently, rubbing his other hand back and forth on her knee.

“You need a hand?” she asked.

“I got it,” he smiled. And he did appear to be doing fine on his own.

“M’gonna be on top,” he informed her unnecessarily. “Any objections?”

“Are you going to let it go to your head?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t really have a response to that, so she just opened her legs wider while Clint slicked precum over himself with his hand. Eventually, he moved his hands to the mattress on either side of her shoulders, and began to slide it, looking her right in the eyes.

Her body already wanted him, but it hadn’t had time to get wet and relaxed enough to be wholly pleasant. It stung and burned, and she tried to cant her hips and open her legs wider.

“Does it hurt?” Clint asked gently.

“It’s fine,” she breathed. “It’s fine. Just…give me moment.”

“No. It’s not supposed to hurt.” Then he laughed. “Well, this part isn’t. Maybe some other parts, if you mean them to. But not this. Not right now.”

He backed off her and resettled himself, pulling one of her legs up onto his shoulder, and pushing the other off the bed to hang toward the floor. The room air was cold against her bare leg, but she forgot about it completely at the first touch of his tongue against her.

He worked her over, wet and messy. He was breathing hard, forgetting to come up for air as he alternated between burying his tongue in her and nipping at her clit with his lips. He like to cover his upper teeth with his lip and then pin the bud between that and his tongue, pinching and rolling and sucking.

When his lips and tongue and chin were soaked with her, he drew himself up triumphantly, and smirked at where she was panting at the ceiling.

“Ok,” he said. “Let’s see if that works.”

“Oh it worked!” Natasha gasped. “One way or another, it worked.”

“I’m very good at what I do,” Clint said, repositioning himself above her.

That time, when he slide inside, it didn’t take more than a few adjustments to make it seamless. He had been keeping eye contact with her, intense as it had been, but when he bottomed out he closed his eyes briefly.

“You ok?” she teased. Then she paused, considered, and asked more seriously, “Are you ok?”

“I’m fine,” he said, opening his eyes again. “I’m just….I think I’m happy.”

“Well, I guess that makes sense.”

“Yeah?” he laughed, beginning to move within her, pumping slowly and lazily. “You think you’re happy, too?”

“I think I could get there.”

***

For an entire year, they just breathed.

***

She came back into the house along with a swirl of icy snow. With a laugh in her throat and bags of fresh bread in her hands.

“It’s so goddamn cold out there,” she sang. “I love it, I love it, I love it!”

Clint was sitting on the bed, right in the middle of it, with the laptop they’d finally decided to get sitting in front of him. It was closed, and Nat could see the cord trailing off the bed and down to the wall socket. That wasn’t where they usually left it plugged in. He must have moved it. Whatever he’d been doing had taken him long enough that he’d had to get up and move the cord to where he was sitting.

“What?” she asked. She let the bag of bread fall the foot or so to land on the floor. She suddenly didn’t have the energy anymore to keep holding it.

“You said that none of the reports about me were kind,” he said slowly. “I was on the bed, face up and blindfolded, and you dropped a stack of files onto my stomach. I remember the way they felt as they slid off. I remember thinking I might get a papercut.”

“Okay.”

“You said that none of the reports from my superiors had been positive. You said that every single one had had negative things to say about me. And we were in that room. There were no lies there.”

“Yes.”

“But then we were going through my SHIELD file – so much later – and there was that one from Coulson. And it was all nice things. It was beautiful. It made me cry.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t have anything to say about that?”

“You’re not asking a question.”

She wasn’t even sure what she was scared of, but something had happened. She could see it in the way Clint nervously picked at the threads of the blanket underneath him.

“Was that file there before?” he asked. “Did you lie to me after all? Did you just not see it?”

“It wasn’t there when I’d looked before,” she answered.

“And that didn’t concern you?” Clint said calmly. “When you saw it later?”

“I just assumed he’d submitted it for you posthumously. Why?”

“That’s the question. Why. Why would he do that? What possible motivation could there be for submitting a report like that? Submitting it so late, for an agent that’s already dead?”

“I have no idea,” she said. She just wanted to lie down on the floor. She didn’t even have the energy to try and guess what was happening.

“I do,” he said. “See, it got me thinking. I tried to just forget about it, but it kept coming back. So…there’s this news station in Italy that SHIELD sometimes uses to get coded messages out to their agents. Like, if someone has gone to ground or is missing or something, and SHIELD thinks there’s something they desperately need to know. And um…” he gestured with one hand to the closed laptop. “I just went through the last two years of them. Just the segments at the end, where the messages are hidden.”

“While I was out getting food?”

“You took a long time.”

She couldn’t argue with that. She’d sat down on a park bench and spent far too much time reveling in the coming winter.

“So?” she asked. “What did you hear?”

“Barton, come home.”

She couldn’t breath. She’d had the air knocked out of her before, but this wasn’t like that. This wasn’t like she didn’t have the strength to breath in. It was like being in a room with plenty of air but no oxygen. Just mindlessly panting. All effort, and no return.

“Same thing, every night,” Clint continued. “Sometimes there were other messages, too, but there was always that one. Every night. They know, Natasha. They’ve always known. They’ve always been looking for me and…it’s still playing. Still, to this day. Maybe I didn’t kill those Agents after all. Maybe no one knows what really happened that night. Maybe they still want me?”

She didn’t have the vicious cruelty in her that it would have taken to argue that point, not when it was probably truth. Who wouldn’t want him, after all?

“Ok,” she said, blandly. “Well, I’ve got nothing. No plans. No preferences. No opinion. We can just do whatever you want to do. Do you know what you want to do?”

“Yes,” Clint said, looking her straight in the eye. “I know exactly what I want to do.”

“And?”

“I don’t want to go back and be an Agent. But I don’t want to stay here, either. I was thinking of something that’s kind of in-between. Something that means I get to stay with you. See, I’ve got this idea. You want to hear it?”

The oxygen had flooded into her lungs again and when she spoke, she spoke clearly and with a real smile.

“I love you.”

“That’s not an answer to my question,” Clint grinned.

“It is so. It means yes. It means forever.”

“Forever, huh?”

“Forever. This is my promise to you.”

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, ok then.
> 
> It has been an honor having you all with me during this frantic journey. It started out as a one-month NaNoWriMo-driven throw away fic, and now it's turned itself into a fucking series, even though I didn't ask it to. Fml.
> 
> ANYWAY, thank you all so much and have a great day, y'all!


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